From the course: Excel Copilot: Working with PivotTables

Getting suggested insights with Recommended PivotTables

From the course: Excel Copilot: Working with PivotTables

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Getting suggested insights with Recommended PivotTables

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- [Instructor] Earlier in the course, I mentioned that Copilot isn't the only AI tool available for Excel, even when it comes to specific features like pivot tables. In this video, you'll see what I mean in the form of recommended pivot tables. For our example, we'll use the exercise file, Recommended Pivot Tables, a vehicle fuel mileage dataset, which we'll use quite a bit for the remainder of this course. You may have heard the saying the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas, and that's the approach Excel takes here by suggesting multiple pivot tables to get you started with your analysis. Start by placing your cursor anywhere within the dataset, then go to insert recommended pivot tables. A menu will appear on the right, presenting several options. First, confirm above that the pivot table source is set to the MPG table. That looks good there, we can change it if we need to. I'll confirm with the checkbox. Because AI relies on probabilistic methods, the recommendations that you see next might differ from mine and their usefulness can vary. Among the suggestions I receive here, I have one here that is going to summarize vehicle weight by origin and model year. Looks like the next one is weight and MPG by cylinders. Some of these may be more or less helpful here. I'm going to go ahead and select the second one, weight and MPG by cylinders. If you see this one, go ahead and add it to a new worksheet as well, or select another one if you wish. So there are a few things I can do here. The first thing that I'm noticing is that we do have the average weight per vehicle and we're taking the sum of the vehicle mileage. That might not be as useful, so I might want to go ahead here and change this to an average. We could continue formatting this data. We could add additional fields into our pivot table. Maybe I want to break this down by model year. I could do that just like any old pivot table here. We could go ahead and continue modifying and exploring this pivot table. Go back to recommended pivot tables, get more options, and insert them and continue the process. So this feature is really useful for pivot table beginners looking for quick ideas to jumpstart their analyses. However, these suggestions might not be perfect. Human judgment is essential for interpreting your data effectively. And remember, recommended pivot tables will give you suggestions that are largely take it or leave it. There's no way to iterate or refine those suggestions using recommended pivot tables help, you'll have to do that yourself. In contrast, Copilot excels in supporting ongoing refinement and iteration in a way that recommended pivot tables can't. That said, if your main goal is just to brainstorm some initial ideas, recommended pivot tables provides a wider range of starting points than Copilot.

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