Analyze data in Excel

- [Instructor] Copilot can help with actions in Excel that can sometimes be tedious or confusing to use manually like sorting, filtering, analyzing data and more. Before we get started, Copilot for Excel will only work with files stored on one of Microsoft's online storage tools like OneDrive, SharePoint, or files shared on Teams. I'm using Excel on the Web, and this will also work in the Excel desktop application, but even then, you will need to open your Excel files from online storage, not your computer's local storage drive. With that in mind, I'm going to open a spreadsheet from my OneDrive. In Excel, you should make sure the home ribbon is active. And then on the right side, you should see the Copilot button. But before you click that, Copilot in Excel does require your data to be formatted as a table, but that's very easy to do. To simplify this, I'm going to delete the first five rows in this table. Then I'll click this button in the top left corner of my data to select the entire spreadsheet. Then in the home ribbon, I'll click format as table. You will need to choose a color style. It doesn't matter which one you choose. It will confirm the range of data that is selected. Then you can click OK and now my entire spreadsheet is formatted as a table and now I can click the co-pilot button in the home ribbon that opens this co-pilot panel. I can click Get Started and you'll see some suggested prompts at the top. These are great to get started and learn how Copilot works. But because this is an AI, you could also try to type other prompts in the chat field at the bottom. And you can also click this prompt guide button for other options. But let's start with something pretty simple. In the chat field I'll type sort by retail price and I'll point out that one of the columns in my spreadsheet is the suggested retail price and the AI should recognize that. So type in your prompt and you can hit the return key or click the send button and give it a moment. And now my entire table has been sorted according to the price in that column. It has the least expensive items at the top. Let's try a filter. This is a table with different solar power products. The different categories of products are in my first column and I only want to see solar panels. So in the chat field, I'll type filter to only show solar panels. Then hit the return key and give it a moment. And now it's only showing items that have solar panels listed in that category column. And it's still sorted by the retail price. So you can combine sorting and filtering. I'm going to reset that by going to the chat field and type clear the filter and hit the return key. Now the filter is gone. And if I wanted to sort it differently, I could ask Copilot to do that. But let's finish with something a little more complex. Let's ask it to analyze this data to show me the specific information that I need. So in the chat field I'll type, make a column chart showing the package quantity by target consumer. So the package quantity and target consumer are both columns in this table. I'll point out that this is a slightly more complex request but I'm still using natural language. This is going to make a pivot chart even though I'm not using that specific wording. You may have to experiment with different ways of phrasing your requests, but mostly you can type something like this, then press the return key. And after a moment, it shows me a preview of the chart. And if I like it, I can click this button that says Add to a new sheet, to add a new sheet to my document containing that pivot chart. And I can always click on this other sheet down at the bottom to switch back to my original table. And from here, I encourage you to experiment with your own prompts or try the suggested prompts to get an idea of what Excel Copilot can do.