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Institute of Digital Government

Save time in Excel with Copilot

Learning Pathway:

AI 201: Copilot in Everyday Tasks

30 July 2026

Use Copilot in Excel to save time on formatting, formulas, and data analysis.

thumbnail for the article

Why this matters

Many workplace spreadsheets hold useful information, but preparing them for reporting often means repetitive manual work.

Copilot in Excel can format and transform data, create summaries, and highlight trends, so you spend less time on routine tasks and more time on decisions.

Today’s exercise: Reviewing a feedback tracker

Imagine you have an Excel file with citizen feedback data. Each row shows a citizen feedback, whether it has been resolved, and the date it was resolved.

Rather than formatting the sheet manually, we will ask Copilot to do the work for us.

Here's what you need for this exercise

Tools and inputs required:

🛠️ Tool 

Excel

🔗 Feature 

Copilot Chat in Excel

📂 Your input 

Your Excel file

Example 1: Formatting with Copilot

Let's say you want to use Copilot to highlight unresolved feedback cases.

☑️ Open your Excel sheet. For our example, we have rows of Feedback with:

  • Status: Resolved or Pending

  • Date of Feedback

  • Date of Closure

Excel Sheet

☑️ Open Copilot in the bottom right

Open Copilot

☑️ Ask Copilot to "highlight all pending cases by changing the font to red".

prompt

☑️ Copilot will change the formatting, without any manual effort on your part!

Excel, pending highlighted as Red

Example 2: Adding new columns of data

Let's say you want to know the number of days that have passed since each feedback was received.

☑️ Ask Copilot to "create a new column, calculating the number of days since the date of feedback"

Prompt

☑️ Copilot will create the additional column of data.

Column of data added

Example 3: Create an analytics dashboard

You can also get Copilot to analyse and visualise your data on a new sheet.

☑️ Ask Copilot to "create an analytics dashboard on a new sheet, which provides a summary, insights and visualisations of the data"

Enter a descriptive alt text.

☑️ Review the generated dashboard, and continue chatting with Copilot to make changes.

analytics dashboard

Now it's your turn to try!

Try this out on other spreadsheets, such as project trackers, finance records, HR lists, or inventory logs. With prompts such as:

  • “Group the rows by category and show the count for each group.”

  • “Summarise the main patterns or trends in this workbook in plain English.”

  • “Add a column which calculates the difference between the two date fields.”

The best way to learn is to try, test different prompts, and see what works best for your Excel tasks.

⏭️Next Guide (7 of 7): Summarise Teams chats with Copilot

↩️Return to: AI 201 Learning Pathway

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