What you need to know
- Microsoft announced Copilot today, an AI-powered tool that works across Microsoft 365 applications.
- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Viva, and Teams will all support Copilot.
- Within Excel, Copilot can suggest formulas based on questions you ask it and create charts and visual aids.
Microsoft announced Copilot for a range of applications. Among those is Excel, which will let you ask questions with natural language rather than relying on formulas you know off hand. The AI-powered tool will also share correlations it finds in data, suggest what-if scenarios, and recommend formulas based on the questions that you ask.
Copilot will also be able to generate content, such as charts and other visual aids.
Microsoft shared some examples of what Copilot can do in Excel:
- Give a breakdown of the sales by type and channel. Insert a table.
- Project the impact of [a variable change] and generate a chart to help visualize.
- Model how a change to the growth rate for [variable] would impact my gross margin.
Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Viva and Teams will all support Copilot as well. In addition to the tool working within the apps, Copilot can gather information from one document and use it to create content in another. For example, Copilot can use a Word document to create a PowerPoint presentation.
Copilot is in testing right now among 20 customers, including eight Fortune 500 companies. It will be available in preview for more users later this year.
