Using Copilot within Excel 365

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Copilot 365 has improved hugely over the last year or so Part two of a six-part series of blogs
We first reviewed Copilot 365 in May 2024, and were ... disappointed. A year and a bit on, and we're pleased to report the software is better in every way except cost, although it still has more than its fair share of foibles. Copilot 365 revisited a year and a half after our first review Using Copilot within Excel 365 (this blog) Using Copilot within Outlook 365 Using Copilot with Word and PowerPoint Using Copilot with SharePoint Creating a themed poster using Copilot tools

Copilot 365 has improved hugely over the last year or so

Part two of a six-part series of blogs

We first reviewed Copilot 365 in May 2024, and were ... disappointed. A year and a bit on, and we're pleased to report the software is better in every way except cost, although it still has more than its fair share of foibles.

Copilot 365 revisited a year and a half after our first review
Using Copilot within Excel 365 (this blog)
Using Copilot within Outlook 365
Using Copilot with Word and PowerPoint
Using Copilot with SharePoint
Creating a themed poster using Copilot tools

Posted by Andy Brown on 02 September 2025

For this example I'm going to repeat exactly the same test that I did in my original blog, but with (I hope) very different results. I've uploaded a workbook which contains lots of worksheets, including these two:

These two worksheets contains a list of regions and the towns belonging to each.

I haven't created any tables (this used to be a prerequisite for working with Excel within Copilot) and I haven't got any explicit relationship between the two tables.

I then went to Copilot:

One way to invoke Copilot in Excel.

I want to create a formula to look up the region name for each town, so I typed in this prompt:

This is asking Copilot to display true intelligence: I haven't said what a region is, nor how to tie a town and region together.

Copilot comes up with this excellent suggestion:

This is a perfect solution (given that I haven't got any range names in my workbook).

When you hover over Insert column Copilot highlights what change would be made if you were to click on this button:

This is the column Copilot is proposing to create.

When you click on the column you get this:

The new column correctly looks up the region name for each town.

The only disappointment is that Copilot ignored my second instruction, so I added this:

This isn't quite what I asked for!

Somewhat wearily, I requested a change:

Try again ...

And got this:

This still isn't right, and all my old frustrations with Copilot are resurfacing.

From this I conclude that if you don't know how to create a formula Copilot might well save you time, but because you can't be sure how well it will follow your instructions it will nearly always be quicker to do things yourself in Excel.

Parts of this blog
Copilot 365 revisited a year and a half after our first review Using Copilot within Excel 365 (this blog) Using Copilot within Outlook 365 Using Copilot with Word and PowerPoint Using Copilot with SharePoint Creating a themed poster using Copilot tools

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

Artificial Intelligence training

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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