The COPILOT function in Excel

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The COPILOT function in Excel
The COPILOT function in Excel allows you to ask AI questions and present the answers in an Excel worksheet, but getting access to the function isn't easy and it's non-deterministic responses don't fit well with the Excel ethos.

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 September 2025

In this blog

Versions of Excel
Tricky Requirements
Is this sensible anyway?
Accuracy of results

The headline for this blog is that you can now run queries against an AI model and present the answers in Excel. For example:

This function should list the top 5 selling UK singles, starting in cell D3. You can see examples of how the COPILOT function works in this Microsoft blog.

The rest of this blog is one big but!

Versions of Excel

The COPILOT function is currently in preview. You will need to have version 2509 of Excel to use it:

I've moved to the Beta Channel (I was on the Insider Channel, but even this wasn't enough, as I was only on version 2508).

What this means is that most people will need to wait a while before they have access to this new function.

Tricky Requirements

To be able to use the COPILOT function it's not enough to be on the right version of Excel - you also need to jump through the following hoops:

Hoop	My notes
Saving to the cloud	You can use Excel on your desktop, but you must save your file to OneDrive or SharePoint so that Microsoft can see it in the cloud (you must also have the AutoSave feature turned on).
A Copilot 365 licence	It's not enough to have a standard Office 365 licence; you also need the (expensive, and separate) Copilot licence, which costs about £200 per year (and which you can't pay for monthly).

I wasn't prepared to install a Beta Channel Excel on one of our training accounts, so while I am able to use COPILOT I can't see the results. Although I can type in formulae using this function, this is what the results show:

Since I've met all the other criteria, this must be because I don't have a Copilot licence on this account.

Is this sensible anyway?

Excel is a spreadsheet application designed to impose order on numbers, and as such is ill-designed to cope with the sort of fluffy, unreliable data returned by AI tools:

Normally the formula result at the bottom left would show the word Volatile for a function like this, but the COPILOT function will generate different results every time you recalculate your worksheet!

I'm also unhappy at running an AI query so frequently: this really doesn't seem like a good use of the planet's resources.

Accuracy of results

Although this is probably the least of your concerns, it's worth knowing that (at the time of writing in September 2025):

The COPILOT function uses version GPT 4.1 mini of the underlying AI tool, which is far from the latest one.
This model only includes data up to June 2024.

On the plus side none of the data you submit is used to train ChatGPT's models.

I'm a fervent believer in the magic of AI, and use tools like ChatGPT every day in my work. However I think the non-deterministic results that it returns just aren't suitable for use in a tool like Excel which depends on reliable data. There's possibly a case for creating a COPILOT function and then copying the data returned into Excel and pasting it as values, but why not in this case just copy the answer to your query from your favourite AI tool's chat window?

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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