How to Get Useful Results From Copilot in Excel

A regional manager pastes last month’s sales export into a workbook, opens Copilot and asks for total revenue by region. The answer arrives in seconds, neatly laid out, and it may well be too high: the export carried a subtotal under each region, and to anything summing the column those rows look like more sales.

To get useful results from Copilot in Excel, set the workbook up first, ask for one job at a time, and check each answer against the data before you rely on it. The checking is there for a reason. In a 2025 test by the UK Department for Business and Trade (DBT), staff using Copilot did an Excel analysis more slowly and less accurately than colleagues working without it, though the test was small and its authors class the result as supplementary.¹ Five jobs cover most everyday requests:

1. Clean up the data before you analyze it
2. Have Copilot write and explain formulas
3. Summarize data and text, then trace the summary back
4. Build charts and PivotTables you can rebuild
5. Find outliers, then judge them yourself

For what Copilot does across Word, Outlook and Teams, and why spreadsheet work came out weakest in UK government trials, see the guide to Microsoft Copilot in Office. Feature details below come from Microsoft’s support pages as of 24 October 2026.

How to turn on Copilot in Excel

If your Microsoft 365 plan includes Copilot, Excel shows a Copilot icon in the lower-right corner of the workbook, and selecting it opens the Copilot pane. Microsoft says Copilot in Excel runs on Windows, Mac, the web, iPad, iPhone and Android, though the tablet and phone apps offer fewer modes.²

Whether the icon appears depends on your license. Microsoft’s Excel FAQ lists four routes: Microsoft 365 Personal or Family with an AI credits plan, Microsoft 365 Premium, a commercial Microsoft Copilot subscription, or a business or enterprise plan that qualifies for Copilot Chat. A label in the app shows which you have: “M365 Copilot (Premium)” means your organization pays for the add-on and you get priority access, while “M365 Copilot (Basic)” means standard access without it.³ Standard access depends on spare capacity, so Microsoft warns it can be slower or briefly restricted at busy times.⁴ Plans and prices differ by country and by organization: at work, ask IT; for a home plan, check Microsoft’s licensing page for your market.

Copilot in Excel has three modes, and the choice matters. Edit mode, the default, changes your workbook directly; plan mode sets out the steps for you to approve first; chat mode answers in the pane and leaves the sheet alone.² An analyst trying Copilot on next quarter’s budget model would start in plan or chat mode and use edit mode only on a copy.

The pane also has a model picker, which you can leave on Auto to let Copilot choose. Microsoft says you can switch between Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT models for the session; that needs a commercial Copilot subscription or Microsoft 365 Premium, and in a company account an admin must first allow Anthropic as a provider.³ If a colleague’s answers differ from yours on the same file, check which model and which mode each of you used.

Why Copilot is not working in your Excel file

When the Copilot button seems to be missing, Microsoft’s troubleshooting page says it has usually either moved to the lower-right corner of the document, or your license, update channel or privacy settings need attention.⁵ Trouble with one particular workbook has other causes, which the table sets out with Microsoft’s fixes.

At work, licenses, update channels and privacy settings are often managed centrally, so if the first two rows do not help, tell IT which one matches what you see.

Set up the workbook before you prompt

Copilot answers better when it can tell what each column holds, which is why headers and layout matter. Microsoft’s tips tell you to name the columns or ranges you want Copilot to work with.⁷ Its formula suggestions, too, draw on headers, nearby cells and tables.⁸

Formatting the range as an Excel table is an easy way to give Copilot that structure. Select a cell in the data, choose Home, then Format as Table, and tick the box that says the table has headers. Excel then gives every column a header with filter buttons and copies a formula typed in one cell down the whole column.⁹

The sales export in the opening example is a typical case. Exports like it often arrive with a report title across the top, two rows of headers, a blank line between regions and a subtotal under each one. A few minutes of cleanup prevents the double count: one header row with plain names such as Region, Month and Revenue, nothing below it except records, then Format as Table.

Where you save the file matters too. Microsoft suggests turning AutoSave off when you want to try Copilot’s changes without saving them, and reminds users that Copilot edits the workbook directly.⁷ Version history, the easiest way back to an earlier copy, works only for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, so keep any workbook you let Copilot edit there.¹⁰

Five jobs to give Copilot in Excel, with a check for each

These five jobs match the main tasks Microsoft’s help pages describe for Copilot in Excel. Each step gives a worked promptprompt: The instruction or input a person gives a generative AI system, such as a question, a description of a task or a block of pasted text. The same request worded differently can produce noticeably different answers.Full entry in the glossary with made-up column names to swap for yours, what a good answer looks like, and a quick check.

1. Clean up the data before you analyze it

Copilot can change cell values, apply data validation and conditional formatting, and sort, filter or highlight rows.² Cleaning makes a good first job because every change is visible.

A good answer lists in the pane what it changed and adds the flag column instead of removing rows. To check it, compare the row count before and after (select a column and read the count in the status bar), filter the Check column, and read a few of the changed names. If anything looks wrong, Undo or version history takes you back.

2. Have Copilot write and explain formulas

Copilot in Excel can write formulas. Microsoft says it adds calculated columns and summary rows, suggests a formula for a single cell, builds lookups such as XLOOKUP (see when to use XLOOKUP instead of VLOOKUP) and explains what an existing formula does.¹¹ It also suggests whole formulas as soon as you type an equals sign, a feature you can switch off on Windows under File, Options, Copilot.⁸

A good answer puts one formula in a new table column, so it fills every row, and explains it in a sentence you can follow. Work out two rows by hand, including an awkward one: a row with zero revenue will produce an error unless the formula handles it. Asking Copilot to explain the formula in a given cell is also a quick way into an inherited workbook. Spreadsheets go wrong often enough without AI, as the beginner’s guide to spreadsheet automation shows, so test any formula before other sheets depend on it.

3. Summarize data and text, then trace the summary back

Copilot can answer plain questions about numbers, such as which region had the highest and lowest sales. It can also read long text columns (survey comments, reviews, bug reports), pick out themes and add them to the sheet as a new column. For text, Microsoft says a superscript number in the answer shows the source data Copilot used when you hover over it.¹¹

A good answer names themes you recognize and labels every row. Hover over the superscripts to see which rows each theme came from, then read ten or so rows at random and ask whether you would have labeled them the same way. For a question about numbers, rebuild the answer once with a filter or SUMIFS before you quote it in a meeting.

4. Build charts and PivotTables you can rebuild

Copilot can build a chart or PivotTable from a description, and Microsoft advises including detail, then adding more and asking again when the first attempt misses.¹²

A good answer is a PivotTable you could have built yourself, with exactly the fields you named. Checking it takes a minute. The grand total should equal a plain SUM of the Revenue column, and any filter Copilot added should be one you asked for. For a chart, read the axis labels and units before it goes into a slide.

5. Find outliers, then judge them yourself

Microsoft’s sample prompt for this job simply asks whether the data has any outliers or anomalies, and the same page says naming the columns gives more accurate results.¹¹ A rule you set yourself is easier to check than Copilot’s idea of unusual.

A good answer highlights the rows and says how it worked out each median. Sort one category by Amount to confirm the flagged rows are the large ones. A flagged row is a question, since a yearly software payment and a typing error look the same to a formula. Microsoft’s FAQ advises against using Copilot for decisions in sensitive areas such as finance, legal or medical matters.³ Before you run it on salaries, customer records or anything confidential, check what your company’s AI use policy allows.

How accurate is Copilot in Excel?

We found no large independent test of Copilot in Excel. The two results we did find, a small observed test by a UK department and Microsoft’s own 2025 benchmark, both suggest it gets a large share of spreadsheet work wrong.

Six people is a tiny sample, and the authors say differences in skill between the two groups may explain part of the result.¹ The sessions also came before the agent-style editing Microsoft described later in 2025. What the test does show is that time savings people report for themselves in a diary studydiary study: A study in which people record what they do or feel repeatedly, often daily or when prompted at random moments, close to when it happens; the prompted form is called experience sampling. It relies less on memory, but it is still self-report.Full entry in the glossary can hide spreadsheet work that is slower and weaker.

In September 2025, Microsoft’s Excel team reported that its Agent Mode, which edits the workbook directly, got a little over half of the tasks right in SpreadsheetBench, a public set of spreadsheet problems.¹³ That is a vendor’s own test on a benchmark rather than real work, and models have changed since, but by Microsoft’s own count close to half the tasks were not done correctly.

For everyday work, both results lead to the same habit: treat a Copilot answer as a first draft and run the check from the matching job above, most of all on figures that will reach a manager, a client or a report.

Myth

If Copilot says its result matches your request, the numbers are right.

Fact

Microsoft says Copilot reviews its results against your request, but its insights and formulas can still be inaccurate, so review and verify anything it creates.

The bottom line

Copilot in Excel gives its best answers on a clean table with clearly named columns, and every answer still needs a person to check it. Before your next prompt, format the data as a table, save the file to OneDrive or SharePoint, start in plan or chat mode, and work out two rows of anything it calculates by hand before you share the result.