Analyze data in Excel

Copilot can help you work in Excel, 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 could use Excel on the web, but if you use the Excel desktop application, when you open your document, you cannot open a file from your computer. You'll need to open a file from OneDrive or SharePoint. With a spreadsheet open, there is an autosave option near the top left. That option is not there if you use Excel on the web, but if you use a desktop application, autosave must be enabled before you can use Copilot and Excel. Next, make sure the Home ribbon is active and you will see the Copilot button near the top right. You can click that to open the Copilot Assistant. There are some suggested prompts at the top, and these are great to get started and learn how Copilot works. And you can also click this View Prompts button for more options. But for now, I'll just write a few of my own prompts using natural language. Now, this spreadsheet contains a product inventory. One of the columns in the sheet is suggested retail. So I will ask Copilot to sort by retail price. Now, it does not immediately sort the sheet. Instead, it analyzes the data, then shows the action that it thinks I want. This gives me the chance to check what it's suggesting. This looks right, so I'll click apply. And now the table is sorted so the items with the lowest retail price are at the top. And I can always ask follow-up questions and Copilot will remember the context. So I'll tell it to reverse that. And it shows the suggested change, and I'll click apply. And now it has reversed the sorting order so the most expensive items are at the top. And it also offers an undo button right here in the chat, so I could undo that if it were wrong. Next, let's try a filter. There are lots of different types of products in this inventory sheet. I see inverters, batteries, solar panels, and more. I'll ask it to filter to only show batteries. Again it shows me the suggested change and I'll click apply. And now it's only showing items that have batteries listed in that category column. And it's still sorted by retail price. So you can combine sorting and filtering. I'll reset by telling Copilot to clear the filter and apply that change. And let's finish by asking Copilot to analyze this data to show me some specific information. There are several items that have the category of inverters, several batteries, several different types of solar panels, and so on. I'll ask it to show me the total number of units from each category. And now it's showing me this chart. And this is a pivot chart. Now, I don't really know how to make a pivot chart, but Copilot does. I could have asked Copilot specifically to make a pivot chart, and that also would have worked, but I didn't need to use that language. It understood the analysis I was asking for in plain language, and Copilot suggested a pivot chart. If I want a pivot table instead, I could ask for that in a follow-up question. And again, I'll just use natural language. I'll say, give me that in a table. And here is a pivot table. I want to keep this so I can click this button to add it to a new sheet in this document. And now I have a separate sheet, a separate tab in this document. And in that new sheet, I have the table. And when I click somewhere in that table, Excel opens up the pivot table controls on the right. So this is a pivot table. If you know how to work with and modify pivot tables, you can do that here, but you don't have to because Copilot was able to analyze my data based on my plain language requests. I'll click the tab to go back to the original sheet in this document, but my pivot table is still saved in that new tab. And from here, I encourage you to experiment with your own prompts or try suggested prompts to get an idea of what Copilot can do in Excel.