Microsoft Copilot can now help with Excel formulas, PowerPoint creation, and more

After a year and a half of use, the generative artificial intelligence tool Copilot has reached a point where it is truly useful. That place, literally and figuratively, is in Microsoft Excel.

During Monday’s Microsoft 365 Copilot livestream, CEO Satya Nadella announced Copilot features for OG spreadsheets and other 365 applications like PowerPoint, a collaborative “canvas” called Copilot Pages, and customizable AI agents.

While the livestream is primarily aimed at Microsoft’s enterprise customers rather than casual viewers (it’s hosted on LinkedIn, for Pete’s sake), there are still plenty of features and announcements for every Microsoft 365 user to enjoy.

We’ve rounded up the key points you need to know about the event.

New Copilot features in Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, Word and OneDrive

As mentioned above, Copilot for Excel is a noteworthy addition to this suite of features. Copilot can help Excel users format data, assist with common formulas such as XLOOKUP and SUMIF, and visualize data in charts and pivot tables. It can also process text, not just numbers, so users can search for keywords and phrases and analyze the data accordingly. Copilot in Excel goes live today.

Microsoft also said that Copilot in Excel can understand Python, so users who are not familiar with programming languages ​​​​can use Python without any coding knowledge.

Copilot in Excel Learn about Python now.
Image source: Microsoft

In PowerPoint, Copilot can generate an outline for a presentation based on prompts by pulling data from 365 sources. It can then put the information into individual slides and design presentations, even pulling in brand images or images generated based on the DALL-E 3’s artificial intelligence. According to the announcement, Copilot’s “Brand Storytelling” feature in PowerPoint does not have a release date, but it will be available soon.

Copilot’s brand storytelling tool does the heavy lifting of creating PowerPoint.
Image source: Microsoft

Copilot is already used to summarize meeting notes in Teams, but now it can also merge conversations that happened in chat. This feature will be rolled out this month.

For Outlook, Copilot can prioritize important emails in your inbox, provide a summary of the content of each email, and generate suggested responses. Sound familiar? Apple recently announced a similar feature for its Mail app, which uses Apple Intelligence to prioritize and summarize your inbox. Priority Inbox will be available for public preview by the end of 2024.

Coming soon, Copilot can prioritize your email in Outlook.
Image source: Microsoft

Word also takes advantage of Copilot’s summarization and data collection capabilities. Through the Copilot sidebar, users can pull work data from email, other 365 applications, and the web to produce drafts in documents. Now this is also generally available.

Last but not least, what makes it all possible is OneDrive, the cloud storage platform for all your work stuff – and it’s also been given an AI-powered makeover. On OneDrive, Copilot will help you find and sort related files and summarize them so you don’t have to click around to find what you need. The feature is available now on OneDrive and will be widely available later this month.

Copilot page for collaborating on Copilot responses

Through Microsoft’s new Copilot page tool, users can share Copilot responses with other team members and collaborate on projects in a separate canvas within BizChat.

“You and your team can work collaboratively in a single page with Copilot, see everyone’s work in real time, and iterate with Copilot like a partner, adding more from your data, files, and network,” the announcement reads. to your page. It allows other users to build on the original Copilot response, eliminating the need for independent research within Copilot.

Copilot is responsive and enables collaboration through new page tools.
Image source: Microsoft

Copilot pages are available through BizChat starting today, and a free version of Microsoft Copilot will be available for users with Microsoft Entra accounts in the coming weeks.

Copilot Agent is fully available

Launched in May last year, Copilot agents act as customizable artificial intelligence assistants that automate certain tasks. Similar to a Google feature called AI Teammates shown at Google I/O, users can share internal knowledge and databases with agents and train to run certain tasks in the background. This might be creating an agent to onboard new employees, or creating an agent to act as a field service technician to troubleshoot mechanical issues in the field.

Customized Copilot agents can solve on-site problems.
Image source: Microsoft

As of today, agents are generally available. With this announcement, Microsoft also introduces Agent Builder, a user-friendly tool that helps users easily build agents without the need for on-the-fly engineering knowledge. Copilot agents will provide services through BizChat and will be rolling out to customers in the coming weeks.