Microsoft Fires Back at Google Sheets with Its Own Powerful AI for Excel.

For anyone who has ever stared at a spreadsheet, wishing you could just tell it what to do instead of trying to remember a complicated formula, Microsoft has some incredible news. A new AI feature called “COPILOT” is being added to Excel, and it’s designed to understand plain English.

Think of it like having a smart assistant living inside your cells. Instead of typing a complex formula, you can now write a simple command to get things done.

For example, if you have a long list of customer reviews, you could type a formula like: =COPILOT("Classify this feedback as positive or negative", D4:D18). The AI will then analyze the text in each cell and automatically label it for you. It’s a powerful way to handle tasks like sorting data, summarizing long blocks of text, or even generating product descriptions from a list of features.

This new function is powered by the same kind of AI technology seen in other popular tools and is Microsoft’s answer to similar features recently introduced in Google Sheets.

Now, before you get too excited, there are a few important things to know. First, the AI can only see the data inside your current spreadsheet—it can’t browse the internet for answers. There’s also a limit on how often you can use it to prevent overload.

Most importantly, Microsoft is clear that this tool isn’t perfect yet. You shouldn’t rely on it for highly sensitive or precise work, like legal documents or critical financial reports, because the AI can sometimes make mistakes.

On the privacy front, Microsoft assures users that none of the data you process with COPILOT is used to train their AI models, so your information stays private.

Want to try it out? For now, the feature is rolling out in a beta test for people who have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license on Windows and Mac. Microsoft plans to keep improving it and will likely release it to more users in the future. This is a huge step in making powerful data tools easier for everyone to use, not just spreadsheet experts.