Get help from Copilot in Excel - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- [Instructor] Artificial intelligence continues to grow at a rapid pace throughout the world, and it's no exception here in Microsoft 365, specifically, Excel. It's called Copilot, and it's what we're going to explore in this movie as we continue working with our Globe Bank Projected Revenues workbook, GlobeBankPR0207, if you're catching up. Now one thing, to use Copilot, you're going to need to save your workbook to the cloud. It could be saved, for example, to your OneDrive, either personal or for business. You might have access to SharePoint services in your organization. Either way, it must be stored in the cloud before Copilot is going to work. Now, we saw earlier, and we turned this off, that when we move to certain cells, this little icon appears just to the right, Copilot, and clicking it will show you what options are available. You can see there's a lot that are grayed out here, and then there's Ask Copilot, and there's where we went to hide this until we reopened it. Well, we're going to first take our entire workbook and save it to the cloud, and we can easily do that by simply going up to the Quick Access toolbar in the top left corner here, and where we see AutoSave is turned off, click that slider button to turn it on. So this is going to give you your options for where you can store your workbook in the cloud. For me, I have a OneDrive for Business account at Globe Bank, and down below, I could sign into my own personal OneDrive if I wanted to as well. You might see other options here in your organization, like I mentioned earlier, SharePoint, for example, but I'm going to save it to my OneDrive for Business by simply clicking OneDrive, GlobeBankInc, takes a moment, and things are going to change slightly in my workbook here. For example, because it's saved to the cloud now, it's automatically going to be saving any changes that are made, and we can see, when we go back to the Quick Access toolbar, AutoSave is turned on. The save button looks a little bit different. We don't really need to go here very often to save changes because they're automatically saved as we make them. You can see there's this little circular arrow in the bottom corner of the save button just to remind you that this is automatically saving as you make changes. So now that we've done that, we're ready to start working with Copilot. Now one thing I found is it's better to have your data in a table. It has an easier time finding your data and making sense of it if it's all inside a table. Now, right now, our data's just sitting on the sheet, but, for example, we could go to cell A2, click and drag across and down to get all of our data, including the labels, and turn that into a table. We do it by going up to the Insert tab and selecting Table. There's the range. Our table does have headers. That's the labels we see across the top for each of the months. We click OK, and now our data's in the default table format, which, of course, we can change. Let's go to Table Styles, click the dropdown, and choose this first one, which is no style at all. Click there, click in the background, and now we have a table, and we don't see all of the borders for the rows and columns that we see with a typical table, but they're there, and we know because we see these little dropdown buttons for filtering. So now we can go anywhere inside the table, click there, and if you see this little Copilot icon pop up to the top right of your selected cell, go ahead and click it now. Look at all the options we have to choose from. We can get deeper analysis with Python, suggest a formula column, suggest formatting, conditional formatting, all of these things, including an option here to ask Copilot to do something for us. Now click in the background, and click anywhere in your table if you aren't already on a cell, and you'll also notice, Copilot appears on the ribbon at the very end with the Home tab selected. We can go here to open up the Copilot pane on the right-hand side of our screen. So this opens up, and we're going to see some instructions and options here. For example, suggest a formula column. We can create formulas. Maybe it would be nice if we scroll over to the end of December in column M to add totals for each of the locations. Now, you can see there are some things that we can say or ask of Copilot, and there's a field down below where we can ask a question, and you can see, the range is already there, A2 to M8, because we put it in a table, and that's where we have clicked inside the table. So, let's try it out. Let's click anywhere in there, and we don't have to ask. We can actually tell Copilot what to do, like Create a column that totals the values for each location, and all we do now is click Send. If you have a microphone attached to your device or computer, by the way, you can also use your microphone to just say it, but you can type it in like we did and click Send, and it's going to send off those instructions to Copilot. Copilot is now busy looking at the data in our table and generating some options, and as we scroll up, you can see it's just finishing up here. There are some things that show up up above, for example, you can see Calculates a total annual value for each location by summing up the monthly values from January to December. That's exactly what we wanted. Down below, you can see what that would look like, and watch what happens. Make sure you can see the empty column to the right of December. If not, just use your scroll bar at the bottom to get there, and hover over the Insert column button. You can see a preview of what's about to be inserted if you decide to go along with what Copilot is recommending, and I think it's exactly what we want, so we click Insert column, and it's there. We didn't have to do anything. Yes, we could have done it ourselves and figured it out, but with Copilot, it's just done. If you don't like it, you can always Undo it, but I like it. So let's just click anywhere in the table again to deselect. Copilot's really helped save us some time and effort there. There are some other things that show up, like Show data insights, suggestion there for a formula column again, and conditional formatting, but data insights is interesting. Copilot's going to look at your data, analyze it, and give you some insights. You might see correlations, for example, that you wouldn't see just looking at the chart or looking at the numerical data on our page, so, let's go to Show data insights. See it's working on it. It's going to come up with some things down below, and we can select those things if we want to or look at some other options. For example here, as we scroll up, we're going to see data insights show the sum of values for May by location. Just happened to choose May and Canada, so it found some correlation there, you can see. We can add this to a new sheet if we like that. May by location, and there's our command to show data insights. Now, maybe we want to see more than this. Well, down below, we can see another insight or Add all insights to Grid. All that means is it's going to create a new sheet, and it's going to add all the insights to that sheet, so we don't have to look at them here in the Copilot pane. Go ahead and click that, and you can see, a new sheet is created, Sheet2, and it's filled with all kinds of different insights. So we can scroll through these, looking at them, different correlations, different charts, we have pivot tables down below. Any or all of these can be kept, or, of course, we can go in and take things out that we don't need, but all of our insights are located on a separate sheet now. When you get into multiple sheets, and we talked about how clicking the plus sign allows us to add a new sheet, you might want to start labeling these sheets so you know exactly what's on them. For example, Sheet2 here, we can double click and type in Insights. Press Enter to lock that in, and Sheet1, double click that. That's our projected revenues for 2026 here, so let's just type in the year, 2026, and press Enter. Now we have our two tabs. We can go to the insights at any time, all created from Copilot. Now Copilot can do a whole lot more, of course. We'll close the button, though, when we don't need it to collapse that pane. We'll go back to our 2026 tab here, knowing that we can access artificial intelligence built right into the application when we need it to save us some time and a lot of effort.