Excel’s Latest Feature Will Make Your Cells Way Smarter

This is the age of AI, and most of the new features that we will see on the software that we use daily will probably be AI features – until the bubble eventually appears, at least. Now Excel gets a new COPILOT function, and if you use it correctly, it could be quite useful.

Microsoft Excel adds a new co -pilot function. I’m sure you know what Copilot is, so that you can imagine what this function does. And this is not the only addition based on the co -pilot in Excel in recent times. But if you need to explain, it allows you to carry out a complex analysis of data and a generation of content using simple natural language prompts in a formula. You just type the prompt in the formula in the same way as you type an invite in a chatbot, and Excel will fill one or more fields at best with its capacity in the parameters you have specified in said formula. Instead of giving you a text release, he will try to follow your instructions to search and add information to your sheet.

Unlike existing AI supplements or separate applications, this function is integrated into the Excel base calculation engine. This integration means that all the results generated by AI are automatically updated each time the source of referenced cells change. The new feature works like any other Excel formula. All you have to do is to enter = Copilot () in a cell with a series of arguments that define the task. The basic syntax is = copilot (prompt_part1, [context1]…), where “prompt_part” is the text instruction for the AI model, and the optional context is a cell or a range of cells containing the data to be analyzed – in case you need co -pilot to analyze certain cells in your sheet, because it can otherwise remove things from its knowledge base. He cannot yet seek on the Internet, but he could obtain this ability in the future.

Microsoft

For example, a user with a column of customer comments could use the formula = Copilot (“classify the feeling of these comments as positive, negative or neutral”, A2: A100) to automatically analyze and categorize each comment. The function can also be nested in other traditional Excel functions such as IF or Lambda, allowing you to set up neat stuff such as financial models and dashboards.

The quality of the output strongly depends on the clarity of the user’s prompt. Direct words of action such as “summarizing” or “row” and provide examples in the prompt are recommended to obtain the best results. Of course, this is AI, and it can make mistakes, so if the exit is not quite what you are looking for, you can change the prompt until you get the result you want.

This feature is now landing for beta users with a Copilot Microsoft 365 license, and it will also be available on the web version via the Frontier program. He will probably land for people in the stable branch in the coming weeks or months.

Source: Microsoft