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Working with Excel Agent
Natural-language analysis, formulas and charts — and Agent Mode, where you describe the outcome and Excel plans, executes and verifies the work itself.
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Natural-language analysis, formulas and charts — and Agent Mode, where you describe the outcome and Excel plans, executes and verifies the work itself.
Book This Session →Excel is where most of an organisation's data work happens — and it's also where Copilot has taken its biggest step forward. Copilot in Excel lets users ask natural-language questions of their data, generate and explain complex formulas, identify trends and create charts without writing a single function. Agent Mode goes further: instead of answering one question at a time, you describe the outcome you need — "build a monthly budget tracker from this export" or "clean this dataset and summarise it by region" — and the agent plans the steps, executes them in the workbook, checks its own results and refines them until the job is done.
This session covers both layers: the everyday Copilot pane for quick analysis, and Agent Mode for multi-step spreadsheet work that would otherwise take hours or specialist skills. Best suited to analysts, finance teams, project managers, operations leads and anyone who lives in spreadsheets — including the many users whose data work is currently limited by what formulas they happen to know.
A focused session designed to build real-world skills fast.
The requirements that make Copilot in Excel work — formatting your data as a table and the licence prerequisites. We open the Copilot pane and build a realistic picture of what it can and cannot do before asking it to do anything.
Asking natural-language questions about your data — "what were the top five results last month?" — and getting instant answers. We generate formulas complete with plain-English explanations, then ask Copilot to identify trends, outliers and anomalies hiding in a dataset.
Adding a chart by simply describing the one you want in plain language. We then apply conditional formatting and highlighting through Copilot instructions, and sort, filter and segment data without touching a menu.
What Agent Mode is — outcome-driven spreadsheet work instead of one question at a time — and how to write an effective brief that describes the workbook you want, not the steps. We watch the agent plan, execute, verify and refine in a loop, build a structured workbook from raw data in one task, and run multi-step analysis with calculations, pivot-style summaries and charts from a single brief, reviewing and steering it by checking output, correcting course and re-running steps.
Python in Excel with Copilot — generating serious analysis without writing code — and a clear framework for when to use Agent Mode, the Copilot pane or your own hands. We look honestly at limitations, including when Power Query is still the better tool, and finish with responsible use: verifying AI-generated numbers, formulas and charts before decisions rest on them.