After a year and a half of Copilot, the generative AI tool is getting to a genuinely useful place. That literal and figurative place is in Microsoft Excel.
At the Microsoft 365 Copilot livestream on Monday, CEO Satya Nadella announced Copilot features for the OG spreadsheet program and other 365 apps like PowerPoint, a collaborative “canvas” called Copilot Pages, and customizable AI Agents.
While the livestream was mostly meant for Microsoft’s enterprise customers and not for the casual viewer (it was hosted on LinkedIn, for Pete’s sake), there were plenty of features and announcements for every Microsoft 365 user to appreciate.
We’ve rounded up the takeaways from the event that you need to know about.
New Copilot features in Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, Word, and OneDrive
As mentioned above, Copilot for Excel is a noteworthy addition to the suite of capabilities. Copilot can help Excel users format data, help with common formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF, and visualize data in charts and pivot tables. It can also work with text, not just numbers, so users can search for keywords and phrases and analyze data accordingly. Copilot in Excel is live today.
Microsoft also shared that Copilot in Excel understands Python, so users who aren’t familiar with the programming language can use Python without having any prior coding knowledge.
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In PowerPoint, Copilot can generate an outline of a presentation from a prompt by pulling in your data from 365 sources. Then it can slot information into individual slides and design a presentation — even pulling in brand pictures or DALL-E 3-based AI-generated images. Copilot’s “Brand Narrative” feature in PowerPoint doesn’t have a launch date, but it’s coming soon, according to the announcement.
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Copilot was already used for summarizing meeting transcripts in Teams, but now it can also incorporate conversations happening in the chat. This feature will be available this month.
For Outlook, Copilot can prioritize important emails in your inbox and give summaries of what each email entails, and generate recommended responses. Sounds familiar? Apple recently announced a similar feature for its Mail app that uses Apple Intelligence to prioritize and summarize your inbox. Prioritizing your inbox will be available for public preview at the end of 2024.
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Word also leverages Copilot’s summarization and data gathering capabilities. With the Copilot sidebar, users can pull in work data from the emails, other 365 apps, and the web to generate drafts within your document. This is also now generally available.
Last but not least, the whole thing that makes it all possible is OneDrive, the cloud storage platform that stores all your work data — it’s also getting an AI-powered facelift. On OneDrive, Copilot will help you find and sort through relevant files, and summarize them, so you don’t have to click around looking for the file you need. This is rolling out now to OneDrive now and will be broadly available later this month.
Copilot Pages for collaborating on Copilot responses
With Microsoft’s new Copilot Pages tool, users can share Copilot responses with other team members, and collaborate on a project in a freestanding canvas within BizChat.
“You and your team can work collaboratively in a page with Copilot, seeing everyone’s work in real time and iterating with Copilot like a partner, adding more content from your data, files, and the web to your Page,” the announcement said. It eliminates the need for independent research within Copilot by allowing other users to build upoon the initial Copilot response.
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Copilot Pages are available through BizChat starting today, and will roll out to the free Microsoft Copilot version in the coming weeks for users with a Microsoft Entra account.
Copilot Agents get general availability
Unveiled last May, Copilot agents act as customizable AI-powered assistants for automating certain tasks. Similar to a Google feature called AI Teammates that was showcased at Google I/O, users can share internal knowledge and databases with agents and train to run certain tasks in the background. This could be creating an agent to onboard a new employee, or an agent that serves as a field service technician for troubleshooting on-site problems with machinery.
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As of today, agents are generally available. With this announcement, Microsoft has also launched an agent builder, a user-friendly tool which helps users easily build an agent without the need for prompt engineering know-how. Copilot agents will be available through BizChat and will roll out to customers in the coming weeks.
