Analyze data with Copilot in Excel

- [Instructor] Copilot can help you work in Excel. It has some great new capabilities, making it much easier to sort, filter, analyze data and more. But before we get started, Copilot in Excel will only work with files stored on one of Microsoft's online storage tools. You can use Excel on the web, but if you use the Excel desktop application, like I am here, when you open your document, you cannot open a file from your computer where it says This PC. You'll need to open the file from OneDrive or SharePoint. With Excel open, there is an AutoSave option near the top left. That option won't be there if you're using Excel on the web, but if you're using the desktop application, AutoSave must be enabled before you can use Copilot and Excel. So make sure you have this turned on. To get started, we're going to focus on the Copilot icon here on the Home ribbon tab. If I click once on that icon, it's going to bring up the same chat window that we've been accustomed to seeing throughout this course. And whether you're using the licensed or unlicensed version of Copilot, and again, it will designate it at the bottom of the screen, you can click See more to see some prompt ideas and things that you can accomplish in this file. Now, Copilot can answer a lot of questions right from here. But I'm going to close out of this and show you one thing that's only available in the licensed version of Copilot. And that is the ability to click the down arrow. From here, I can use this special button called App Skills. This starts the chat focused on what Copilot can actually do and change in this workbook. In the unlicensed version, Copilot can make some basic changes, but it will involve having to re-download your file. It can't make the actual changes in the file for you while you're looking at it. But we can do that here. Copilot in Excel can perform tasks. It can even add column data. Let's take a look at this event coordinators column. I'll start by asking Copilot to split the event coordinators into first name and last name columns. (computer keys clicking) Copilot is explaining exactly what it's going to do. In fact, from here, it can insert those columns for me. If I hover my mouse over the Insert columns button, it's going to give me a preview of what that looks like. I'll make the Copilot window a little bit smaller so that we can see what that looks like, here it is. If I'm happy with the way that looks, I'll click Insert columns, and here they are. Copilot can even do look-ups ranging from simple to quite complex. I don't have to learn a formula or a function anymore. I just have to learn how to ask Copilot for what I want to accomplish. Let's move to a different tab. I have a list of addresses here and a list of matching phone numbers here. Let's update this column and have Excel add the phone numbers. I'll tell Copilot to add a column containing the phone number. (computer keys clicking) You can check Copilot's work easily again because it's explaining the steps to arrive at answering the request. I'll click Insert column, and there it is. Copilot in Excel can also clean and format data for you. Let's add a thousands comma to the attendee columns. (computer keys clicking) I'll click Apply. And it's made the change. This time, let's have Copilot apply some conditional formatting for us. I'll have Copilot highlight in yellow where the actual attendees was under 1,000. (computer keys clicking) I'll click Apply, and again, it makes the change. Now I can quickly see which conferences are underperforming. You will want to make sure that your header column names are clear and unique for best results. Copilot in Excel can now even generate text on a row-by-row basis with the new COPILOT function, which allows you to pass prompts as a parameter. Have fun exploring all the ways that you can analyze and generate data in Excel.