Basic table reformatting with Copilot

- [Instructor] Excel tables offer a wealth of benefits, not the least of which is their aesthetic appeal. With a couple of clicks, you can transform your data set into a beautifully formatted table, complete with banded rows, filter buttons, and more. Copilot elevates its experience, making it incredibly easy to alter your table's appearance once created. To follow along, open the exercise file named 01_03_table_formatting where you'll find the NYC boroughs table we've been using. You can also go ahead and open Copilot. We'll use App Skills, and I'm going to full screen Copilot. The first thing that stands out about this table is that the population column lacks a comma as a thousand separator, making it challenging to read. I'll fix this by asking Copilot to format the population column with a thousands comma separator, no decimals. Hit, Enter, or click the message icon to send. Copilot will give us its game plan. Here, I'll accept it, click Apply, and now this column is much easier to read. Let's see what else we can tweak. Given that this is New York City data, I'll format the text using the Broadway font. Let's Apply. Okay, now that did not seem to work. Let's try this again. I'm just going to run the prompt. If you don't get your prompt to work as intended the first time, just try it again. And I even see here that it looks like this game plan was exactly what we did earlier with the Palma formatting, so let's just try this again, and this is really what we want. So make sure you read the fine print with Copilot. Let's apply this. While I wouldn't typically recommend this kind of font for data display, it's okay to have a little fun here with our fonts as we're learning. Generally, a simpler sans-serif font, like Segoe UI or Abato would work best for clear readable tables. So for now, we can undo this, either Ctrl + Z or actually just clicking right here Undo in Copilot will fix that. Next, I'm going to make some changes to the appearance of the table's headers and footers. While the filter buttons can be useful, they can also be obtrusive. Right now it looks like we don't have them on. Maybe we do want them on, and let's see if we can add them, Apply, and just like that, they're there. If we don't want it, we can either Undo or what we could even do is possibly, instead of adding, we could remove the filter buttons via a prompt. Let's Apply. And they're gone. By default, our Excel tables do not include totals, however, adding them in with Copilot is straightforward. Let's Insert. And we'll see here that, by default, we do get a sum of each column. If we wanted to change that with the table, there is a dropdown here. Copilot may be able to change those totals from a sum to an average or a count or so forth. Worth trying. We'll leave these as totals for right now. There are numerous other formatting options you might consider, such as changing colors, adding borders, and more. While Copilot excels in some of these areas, others may require manual intervention. For experienced Excel users, these tips might seem basic. You probably already know how to apply formatting changes using keyboard shortcuts or menu options, which might be quicker even than using Copilot. However, the real beauty here in Copilot lies in its ability to intuitively understand and execute your commands regardless of their complexity. The idea here is to simplify your workflow by merely typing out your requirements. Starting with formatting might seem elementary, but considering its significance in data analysis, it's an excellent place to start.