Excel's Major Upgrade: CoPilot (Microsoft Event Recap)

better nerds Microsoft just announced a bombshell announcement that's why today we're announcing co-pilot our vision for everyday AI companion for you and this is for the entire Microsoft ecosystem from automating all your data calculations in Excel and even visualizing it to even building a PowerPoint from scratch that probably has a better chance of keeping your co-workers attention and all of this could be a potential replacement for chat gbt in your workflow so let's dive into the tool that I'm most excited about Excel so co-pilot is available directly inside of your apps you then provide it with a prompt and it controls your spreadsheet in order to carry out the calculations now this heavily relies on python in Excel which runs python code inside of the spreadsheet but with this AI you don't have to know how to actually code in Python and this powerful language can do a whole host of things like not only generating some complex visualizations but also do things like machine learning to help predicting results as someone that prefers to use Python over Excel for that analysis I think this is a great way to get people like me back into the sheets I do want to call out that this iteration of co-pilot inside of excel is somewhat limited as it doesn't even control VBA they probably did this for security reasons but it's still somewhat disappointing that it doesn't have control so you can't do things like pivot tables or graphs or anything type of built-in features now for the catch this isn't free and it's not going to be available until November 1st right now they're looking at charging 30 bucks a month per customer and it will be for Enterprise customers first which already look like they have a hefty price tag so if your work already takes care of this it's no big deal but for somebody like me that uses their family plan you're gonna have to upgrade let's jump into some other tools and to see how I think data nerds can benefit from co-pilot inside of them first with PowerPoint in a video from earlier this year they show how you just upload a Word document to this and it will generate a mind-numbing PowerPoint on its own now imagine if you have some analysis in Excel you could pop it into something like this and generate some slides and you take out all that dirty work that you normally have to do with building presentations next up is Outlook and the only thing I hate more than reading emails is answering them well they have a new feature called sounds like me and as you guessed it it sounds like you by using your previous emails as a template which is kind of cool but also kind of creepy as it even captures your email signature and more insecurity in a bit and this also integrates in with Microsoft teams which you know those meetings that could have been an email yeah this turns this into that all you have to do is make up an excuse and put a fake event on your calendar on why you can't attend that important meeting and from there it takes care of all the work it will alerts your co-workers to record their session then copilot will go through providing a recap of all the major events in it it even gives you a list of action items that your co-workers assigned to you behind your back oh and you can even ask questions about the meeting contents like this feature alone of being able to miss these meetings is worth the 30 bucks in my opinion next up is word and to be honest it didn't look that impressive I've already been using chat GPT to generate copyright so nothing new here but it looks like you can spice up documents with this new designer integration that uses Dolly 3. with it you could generate some visualizations to make it look like you and your co-workers actually enjoy your job alright so there's also a couple of new apps that are being added to Microsoft's lineup like copilot Labs that helped you with generating better prompts to get the results that you need out of these chat Bots the other new app with the calling M365 chat allows you to use this large language model across all the different Microsoft apps it'll Chrome through all your different emails spreadsheets documents and meetings in order to compile this in a single location and provide you the recommendation you need now that's everything for Microsoft apps which like I said it's gonna be released around November 1st but you can get co-pilot for Windows 11 even sooner around September 26th this release will have over 150 new features and and I believe it's the most ambitious update to Windows 11 since we first released it now I'm not gonna lie this also may be over hyped as I got access to the beta for this last month it fumbled with things like even changing my background so I'm less excited about this however in their demo they showed you how to cheat on the SAT by providing it a picture of the problem to solve and for this it was able to analyze a graph along with the text and then solve it so maybe even data nerds could use this to interpret their co-workers horrible graphs and the most creepy but also useful feature is that when you're using Bing an edge which is basically like Chachi BT it can use your previous chat history in order to better inform how it should shape your results but this all now relates to security I know the keyboard Warriors are going crazy about this topic right now well it turns out that your data is still protected and won't be leaked to your co-workers instead everything still means those same it requirements in order to get access which I'm kind of bomb as I hate having to bug it to get permissions now for the large language model running copilot this also sits within the boundary of security so none of your prompts are used to train the large language model or can even be seen by anyone so your boss is never going to figure out that you're trying to plot against them now with how Microsoft is positioning this thing as your own AI personal assistant I think this is a strong possibility of replacing chat gbt in your workflow which I don't think openai sees this as a threat because they're working hand in hand and they're still be making money from this with this positioning and how this tool is built I don't think it's going to take away your job well now at least in a recent study they found that those that used AI had a 40 increase in their quality of work along with being almost 12 percent more productive and 25 percent faster and I've noticed even similar results in my workflow by the way if you're not following me on LinkedIn or Twitter check out the links below alright that I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Luke Barousse

Views: 150,619

Keywords: data viz by luke, business intelligence, data science, bi, computer science, data nerd, data analyst, data scientist, how to, data project, data analytics, portfolio project, sql, excel, python, power bi, tableau, data engineer

Id: NSue6pT_u-Q

Length: 5min 43sec (343 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023