Microsoft has just announced a significant update to Excel that uses AI to tackle menial, time-consuming data-importing tasks. Copilot in Excel can now pull in snippets of information from various sources, saving you the hassle of creating and preparing your figures manually.
Excel can now extract public data like dates and statistics from websites (providing references at the end of the response), and use internal organization data to generate reports. It can also grab information from local network files on programs like Word, PowerPoint, and other Excel files, as well as PDFs. Since Copilot can also help you analyze the data you gather, Microsoft says that this update makes “the entire data collection and analysis process faster, simpler, and more intuitive.”
This feature is currently only available to Insiders with a Copilot license on Windows using Version 2503 (Build 17729.20000) or later or Mac using Version 16.87 (Build 24053110) or later. However, Microsoft says, “This update […] will become available to Excel for the web users in the near future.” This is refreshing to hear, since Microsoft usually leaves us guessing when new features will become generally available.
If you’re one of the lucky ones who does, indeed, fulfill the above criteria, click “Copilot” in the Home tab on the ribbon, ask Copilot a question in plain English about the data you’re looking to import, and follow this up with further prompts in a conversation-type “dialog” until you get what you’re looking for.
For example, Microsoft recommends asking things like “Search the web for a list of 15 intermediate-level vocabulary words in Spanish and their translations” or “Show me next week’s meetings and to-do items in a table.”
Microsoft has acknowledged some flexibility issues with Copilot in Excel’s new capability. For example, you can’t address workbook data and search for external data at the same time, and you can only import refreshable data if it’s properly formatted in an Excel table and saved to the cloud.
Source: Microsoft
