How to Get Faster Insights From Excel With Microsoft 365 Copilot

Power Play 3 of 5: ask your spreadsheet questions in plain English, and get charts, PivotTables, and trend summaries in seconds.

Excel is where most business decisions actually get made. It’s also where the most time before the decision gets spent: building the formula, structuring the PivotTable, choosing the right chart, debugging the reference. And the modern workday makes that worse. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that the average knowledge worker is interrupted every two minutes during core work hours, amounting to roughly 275 interruptions per day from meetings, emails, and chat messages. The kind of focused analysis Excel actually rewards is exactly what those interruptions prevent.

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel lets you skip the analysis-setup tax and go straight to interpretation. Type a question in plain English. Get back a chart, a PivotTable, or a summary. Refine, validate, and share.

Licensing note: as of April 15, 2026, Microsoft moved in-app Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote behind a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The workflow below assumes that license.

How it works

• Open a workbook with a clean, structured Excel table. (Clean data matters more than fancy prompts.)
• Launch Copilot and ask a natural-language question.
• Review the chart, PivotTable, or insight summary Copilot returns.
• Refine by region, product, time period, or owner.
• Always validate the output before sharing with stakeholders.

Key message: Less time on analysis setup. More time on interpretation and action.

What public Copilot trials have measured on data tasks

The Australian Government Microsoft 365 Copilot evaluation found that users perceived Copilot delivered up to an hour per day of savings on activities involving information summarisation and analysis. That figure is self-reported (which the report acknowledges represents an upper bound), but it points to a consistent pattern: Copilot’s biggest impact is in the setup and structure work that has to happen before interpretation begins, not the interpretation itself.

For Excel users specifically, that means the gains aren’t in replacing the analyst. They’re in compressing the time between “we have data” and “we have a chart leadership can react to.” The analyst is still in the loop. The grunt work in front of them is just smaller.

The data prep that makes this work

Copilot in Excel is only as good as the data it’s pointed at. The single biggest thing you can do to improve your results is to make sure your data is in a clean, structured table with named columns, consistent formats, and no merged cells. The five minutes of formatting up front saves an hour of frustration with Copilot down the line. This is the part nobody markets, and it’s the part that determines whether the tool feels magical or broken.

The rest of the Power Plays series

This is one part of a five-blog series on getting real value from Microsoft 365 Copilot. The other plays in the series:

• Power Play 1: Email Mastery in Outlook
• Power Play 2: Document Drafting in Word
• Power Play 4: Presentation Creation in PowerPoint
• Power Play 5: Enterprise Knowledge in Copilot Chat

The bottom line

This is one of five power plays that consistently earn Microsoft 365 Copilot’s license cost. Pick one to start with, build the habit, then layer in the others as the team gets comfortable. Adoption is the work. The tool is just the lever.

If your team is rolling out Copilot, or planning to, and you want help building the adoption framework, training, and governance to do it well, Advanced Business Solutions can help.