Microsoft Copilot in Excel: Expectations vs Reality

Microsoft co-pilot has been available with Excel for a few months now for large Enterprises and also available for individuals and small medium businesses for a few days now how does copilot perform within Excel does it deliver the capability as shown in the Microsoft announcement demo 10 months ago in this video I will demonstrate how copilot perform within excel in comparison to that demo prompt by prompt let's see how it goes at the end of this video I will also share with you what I think the reason is copile is perform with excel at such a level first let's take a look of the demo to look at what's the first prompt and water was accomplished by the co-pilot co-pilot in Excel helps you make sense of all your data say you need to analyze this quarter sales results you start by asking co-pilot to analyze the data and give you three key trends within seconds you've got what you need now on my computer I have a table with some data while showing the sales cases and sales dollars for different customers on the different dates and they bought the different part family products in this table I have more than 6,500 records now given that table I want to ask a same question to my Cod pilot I go to the Home tab and then on the right side I see the Cod pilot icon I click on that that will show the code pallet pain on the right side and now I'm going to ask my first question which will be same prompt as in the demo analyze the business results and summarized three key trends let me click on send working on it aning data and it says sorry I don't have a helpful answer try allow the prompt so it's not doing what's been down in the demo maybe I can ask a different question show me some key change in data set and send working on it analyzing data and now is creating a pivot chart showing the sales cases by date and indicating we have our lers on the different dates on January 17 February 4th and February 26th so it is identifying some outliners now if I choose to accept this I can click on add to a new sheet and now it's adding a new sheet over here with a p table with a p chart along s side and it says down I added s cases has all ler on those different dates to that sheet now let's look at the demo again to look at the second prompt from the demo but you want to drill in you ask co-pilot a follow-up question about one of the trends co-pilot creates a new sheet giving you a Sandbox to play in and helping you better understand what's happening now back to my Exel file I'll ask similar question now in order to continue I have to go back to that table so I will click on go back to table and then I can ask my question show me a breakdown of the sales growth and send working on it data and now it gave me a pivot table which is a grand total of the S dollars so it's not showing me any breakdown it's not showing me any self growth it just G me a grand total again let me ask question in aide different way how did the sales change over time and now it's creating a p chart showing the S Dollar by sell state so this actually better at least gave me this chart to show me by date how the sales dollars is changing and if I accept this I can choose to add to a new sheet now I have the new sheet with the pivot table with self St Group by each individual date and will p a chart on the site now let's look at demo again let's look at what the third prompt you asked co-pilot to visualize what contributed to the decline in sales growth this period co-pilot adds a little color to make the problem jump off the page now back to my Excel file and I want to ask a similar question let me first go back to table I also ask help me visualize what contrib to the sell St change and it's creating a pivot table again with a grand total of the S dolls so it's not visualizing anything it's not showing me any Sal star change not even to mention what's contributing to that so again go back to the demo to so what's the fourth prompt now you want to dig deeper and ask a follow-up question with a what if scenario co-pilot not only answers your question it creates a simple model and even asks if you want to learn more about what it did with a stepbystep breakdown finally you can ask it to create a graph of your projected model co-pilot in Excel turned a sea of data into clear insights and actions now back to my Excel file I want to ask a similar question I would ask what would have happened if a frozen Port family had the same growth rate as fresh P family I know that in the demo it has already done some work so that question was in responding to previous result so here I did not really get any good response so this question may not be very appropriate but let me ask this anyway and let's see it's creating a pivot table grouping by part family and it's counting the number per family and Sh them as percentage I don't think copilot is understanding what I'm asking it's using what I'm giving and providing something relating to that like for different part families uh rate but it's not trly understanding what I really meant so it's giving something kind of related but it's not what I asked for so now you see Bas on few prompt at this time copad is not doing what I expected 10 months ago based on the demo so what copad can really do with Excel so here there some suggested prompts like show Data Insights show suggestions for formula columns how can I highlight filter and sort data Maybe can show Data Insights and now it's giving me a PV chart showing the sales cases by Prof family okay that's something could be helpful let me do the show dat inside again to see if you can give me something different and this time it's G me same thing sales cases bip family the same as previous one sales cases by Prof family let me just type my own prompt show me a different Insight again it's creating this P chart showing the Sal cases by per family so this is the third time G me same P chart now let me go back to the very top of the code palette pen because that has some suggestions like add formula columns highlight sort and filter and analyze let me click an analyze to see whates that suggest I can analyze data and show insights in charts and pivot table select a suggested prompt or describe what you would like to know total s cases for Prof family excluding Dry Goods let's try that it's G me a pivot table showing the Sal cases by P family and fi out the dry goods so basically it's just creating a pivot table and with a fi being applied I can also click this icon to look at some suggested prompt maybe I can use the UN understand and if I click and show inside of the data why will happen sorry I'm having trouble working on prompts right now try sending your prompt later let me go again let me go to un understand again and what is the percentage of finger food sales dos send actually not bad it's G me this pivot table with sales dollars as sh in percentage Group by family with a finger food being highlighted as red being 177% not bad now let me go back again show me the top three customers based on sales dollar it's creating pivot table showing three custom ID with those St amount looks like this might be right let me add the new sheet and I can see this a pivot table and grouping by customer showing this s dollar and if I click on the filter for the custom ID go to Value filters and and top 10 is top three item by some which is correct this the right way to do the filter now let me go back to the co-pilot clearly co-pilot within Excel is not doing well it capability is far less than what's shown in the demo 10 months ago but to be fair if you look at in Exel application this Cod pilot pain it's cly indicated this is in preview cop palet is available in Word Excel PowerPoint Outlook one Noe and team and it's only in the Excel application copad is in preview it's not fully developed yet and that's why we're not seeing all those capability yet my second point is this if the want Microsoft could put those capability showing in the demo already into Cod pilot with Excel because Cod pilot is built upon Chad GPT and Chad GPT has this plugin called dat lysis which can write and execute python code to perform very impressive analysis as a matter of fact the analysis you saw in the Microsoft demo they were not been done by pivot table or formulas they were being down by writing and executing python code in the back end so why hasn't Microsoft produ python capability into copilot with Excel yet it's because they're not reliable yet I have used the chat GPT data analysis tool to perform some analysis with Excel data most of the time it will give me the correct result but sometime it will give me the wrong result so it's not good enough for Microsoft to put that into C- pilot as final product on the other hand even if python is reliable but co-pilot with Excel cannot purely rely on python because with python user only have access to the input and output they don't have visibility and access to the process in the middle which is a black box writing and executing python code in the back end if the user want to take the process in Middle they couldn't they can only reenter the new input and the process will generate the new output one of the reason Excel application so popular is because it allows user to easily and conveniently to TW the process they can click a button to run a command they can write a form in the Cel directly and will generate different output so I believe Microsoft must be working very hard trying to develop stronger capability for co-pilot to execute Excel command directly and to write formula inel directly to so co-pilot within excel at this stage as a preview is not performing very well but I do believe when it's ready it will be able to perform incredible tasks and help us dramatically in this video I focus on the comparison between the capability showing in in the demo 10 months ago and the reality now as a non-finished product but co- with itself now does have many more capability which I'm going to create a more video to show you how if you find this video beneficial please subscribe to my channel and like this video thank you

Channel: Super Excel & AI

Views: 4,720

Keywords: Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot in Excel, AI, Copilot Pro, Microsoft Excel, Copilot for Microsoft 365

Id: mb2vhwSQ6NQ

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024