Write and explain Excel formulas

- Writing formulas can be one of the most complex tasks we do in Excel. So in this lesson, we're gonna look at how to use Copilot to both write formulas and explain existing formulas. (graphic swooshing) So I have this dataset here and I need to categorize these lengths for shipping. So I've opened the Copilot task pane over here, and here gives us some ideas for ways that we can use Copilot. We can click on any of these buttons, or what I'm gonna do is click in the chat box down here and you can type in, or I'm gonna paste in my prompt, which is to write a formula that returns the word bulk if the length is greater than 50, otherwise return the word carrier. We'll go ahead and hit Enter or press the Send button. And Copilot will do some work to understand our data and it will also highlight our data here as it's working on the data. And then once it's complete, we can scroll down here and see that it has recommended this formula and it's given us an explanation. It automatically figured out that we were referring to the data in column C with the lengths. We can see a further explanation of the formula here if we wanna learn more about this IF function. And then right here, we can click Insert Column to actually insert the formula. So I'll go ahead and do that. And we can see that in the cells right up here in the formula bar, we have the formula inserted for us and copied all the way down as well. And of course, this can save you a lot of time, especially if you're not familiar with the IF function or don't yet know how to write this formula. (graphic swooshing) Now, if you ever come across a formula that you don't fully understand, like this one here, we can use Copilot to help explain it. All we need to do is right-click on the cell, go to Copilot Suggestions and Explain This Formula. And if you don't have the Copilot task pane open, this popup will open up with an explanation of the formula and you can click this button down here to open up the task pane if you want to discuss it further. So this is called a nested IF type formula because it contains a lot of IF statements here to categorize these lengths. But there are other ways to write this formula, and we can actually have Copilot explain some alternatives. And here, it gives three different examples of different functions and formulas we could use to write this formula more efficiently. (graphic swooshing) And these buttons at the bottom of the chat are just suggestions on how to continue the conversation. But of course, you can click into the chat box here to ask additional questions. So in this lesson, we looked at how to use Copilot to save time with writing formulas and explaining existing formulas.