Copilot for Excel is your AI Assistant that simply knows everything! In this video, part of my full course on Microsoft 365 Copilot, you will learn how you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel to Highlight, Sort, and Filter Your Data!
FULL Course on Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps (Microsoft Office)
Video Summary
- You can ask Copilot in Excel to highlight the top 10 values in a column, such as the claim amount column, by bolding or changing the font color.
- Copilot can sort data in a column from smallest to largest, making it easier to see the cheapest or most expensive items.
- You can filter data to show specific criteria, like only displaying claims for Toyota cars made after 2018, even if there are minor spelling mistakes in your request.
- If you don’t like the changes Copilot makes, you can easily undo them using the undo button in Excel.
- Copilot provides real-time feedback and status updates while processing your requests, ensuring you know when tasks are completed.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Next up in our list of spreadsheet productivity tips is using Copilot to highlight, sort, and filter your data. Some examples that we can ask Copilot to help us with are to bold the top 10 values in the sales column. We can also ask Copilot to sort the engagement rate from smallest to largest, or you can ask Copilot to filter items that are due next week. Now that we have seen a bit of example prompts, let’s head over to the lab and check out how we can use Copilot in Excel to highlight, sort, and filter your data.
Back in the lab environment, let me open up Excel over here where I’m back in our same document. Let’s go to the top. So what can I ask Copilot to do? I can ask Copilot to bold the top 10 values in the claim amount column. So let’s go here, let’s press on enter. I just want to have them bolded. It will take a few seconds, and if everything goes well, we will have all the top ones bolded. There we go, it finished. You can see I have this one here, the 8,000, 7,000, 9,000, so really the most expensive ones have been bolded. But I don’t really like it. I don’t like the change; it’s not really what I wanted. I can always go here. If Excel does a change to your table, a change to your data, you’ll have an undo button over here. So you see it says done. I made the following changes: I bolded and applied a black font to the top 10 items in that column. I don’t like it. I can click on undo, and there we go, it undid the change. Instead, you know what I want? I want Copilot in Excel to highlight in yellow the top 10 values in the claim amount column. This way, they will pop up more. We will give it a few seconds, especially when you do changes to your data. It always takes a bit more seconds, but you’ll always see the status here where it says almost there, finishing up, applying the changes to the table, and things like that. So depending on how much data you have, it might take one or two seconds, or it can take 10-15 seconds. There we go, now it started doing it. You can see that the top most expensive claims have now been highlighted in yellow, and we also have the confirmation from Copilot that it was done. Perfect.
Now we looked at highlighting and bolding. What if I want to ask Copilot to sort the claim amount from smallest to largest? This way, I don’t see them by claim ID, I don’t see them by year; I just want to see the cheapest ones at the top and scroll down to see the most expensive ones. Now, of course, if it did a good job in the previous prompt, all the largest ones should be at the bottom of the sheet. There we go, as I was talking, it did the change. Let’s go to the bottom here, and all of the ones at the bottom have been highlighted, so it did a good job in the first prompt as well. But now we have a bit of a double confirmation. Great, so good job so far. Let’s do another one. You see that sometimes I just click on a random cell, and then Copilot doesn’t like that. If I ever do it, it says, “Vlad, you need to select data in an Excel table.” So you need to make sure you have some data in the table selected in order to interact with Copilot, because if not, you see it’s grayed out, and I cannot do anything. So let me go back in the table here, and I want to ask it, let’s do some filtering as well. Filter to only show claims of Toyota cars with the vehicle year after 2018. And yes, I have a spelling mistake in there. It’s on purpose. You see it does tell me that I have a spelling mistake, but it doesn’t matter. I want to make sure that it works. Copilot is usually intelligent enough to see those small spelling mistakes and adjust accordingly without giving you random errors because you did a tiny spelling mistake. So we will give it a few seconds here to finish and ignore my spelling mistake. There we go, it’s now finishing up. So I only see Toyotas, that’s good, and I only see Toyotas later than 2018. As you can see, I have my filters here that are greater than 2018. Of course, maybe I wanted to say that are 2018 or older, then it would have done greater than or equal to, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. I just asked Copilot in Excel to filter my data.
So this is it for this demo in which we have seen how we can use Copilot in Excel to highlight data, whether it’s bolding or highlighting, to sort our data, and to filter our data. But we’re not done yet with what Copilot in Excel can do, so let’s head back to the slides and learn more things that we can do with Copilot in Microsoft Excel.
