I first wrote this post about using Copilot with Excel less than a year ago and I thought it was worth updating.

It’s quite a challenge for trainers to train on Copilot because it changes every day and a lot depends on what sort of licence you have. And even that isn’t consistent, so if I write a post or training materials based on the assumption you can do a particular task with a particular licence, that may not be true the following week.

What Copilot training do I deliver?

I now include something on Copilot in most of my bespoke training courses. But the precise contents will depend on the audience.

I’ll typically demonstrate it with a task that I think it can be useful for – usually something that involves data cleaning. And I’ll show how it still gives different answers even with the same prompt.

This usually prompts a useful discussion about the difference between “probabilistic” and “deterministic” tools and which tools are best for which tasks.

I provide realistic examples about things that I have used Copilot for successfully and things that I have not.

I don’t, at the moment, deliver detailed training about using Agents or anything involving the Copilot premium licence. Most of my clients don’t tend to have this licence. However, if you do have it, and if you want more detailed training in what you can do with this I have recommendations for trainers you can use who specialise in this.

My tips for using Copilot with Excel

As at July 2026, here are my views on using Copilot with Excel. They may change in future; I accept that it is a rapidly changing field.

• Don’t use it to build something you can’t understand or verify yourself.
• Ask Copilot how to analyse or visualise your data with reliable Excel functions, rather than asking it to do it for you. In recent months I’m pleased to see that the solutions it comes up tend to do this even without prompting. That is, rather than attempting to summarise your data it now will give you a formula to do it.
• It may not give you the best formula for doing it; and it might also give you a formula when actually this is not appropriate (eg for some data cleansing tasks)
• Obviously be as precise as you can with the prompt. If you know you need to use Power Query to solve it then specify that in the query, and give an example of your data set.
• It has a better hit rate on questions that relate to technology that has been around a while. This is because there is a lot more data out there for it to steal from. I have had better luck with prompts about M code or DAX than I have about dynamic arrays. But you can still waste a lot of time because…
• … it has optimism bias built in so it’s really bad at telling you that something isn’t possible. It will send you round on a little loop suggesting slightly different answers for ever, as far as I can tell.
• if you are going to use it, make sure you’re using it with “Enterprise protection”. You can tell this because you have a little green shield. Beware! If you search for Copilot on your computer, you’ll probably get the version built into Windows 11, which doesn’t have this protection.
• If you are constantly prompting the same thing then you are probably using the wrong tool to solve your problem.

My overall conclusion is this.

Copilot is just one more tool in our arsenal. Knowing when it’s a useful tool and when it’s a waste of time is a powerful part of our overall understanding of how to use Excel effectively.

I would also say – don’t get panicked about it or think that you’re falling behind. It is changing the whole time. We are all still working out what will genuinely be useful for as opposed to what is just hype. And there is a lot of hype!

If you book me for a training course, you can trust that I will give you;

• the latest information – I am constantly updating my own knowledge in this area;
• my day-to-day experience as an Excel consultant and part-time Finance Director in using this technology for real
• honest, hype-free guidance.

PS. Other Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are available. I default to Copilot because many of my clients will have limits around what they can use.

PPS. This post was first published in November 2025.