Microsoft Turns Excel Into an AI Assistant?

Excel used to be the quiet nerd in the corner. You know, the one who only cared about formulas, graphs, and ruining your weekend with error messages. But Microsoft just gave it a glow-up. They added a new COPILOT function, which means Excel can now act like an AI sidekick. Instead of copying and pasting data into ChatGPT and sneaking results back into your spreadsheet, you just type a formula and Excel’s built-in brain does the job.

Imagine you’ve got a whole list of customer complaints about your office coffee machine. Normally, you’d scroll through them one by one until your soul leaves your body. But now you can type =COPILOT("Classify this feedback", D4:D18) and Excel will neatly organize it into categories like “Too bitter,” “Too weak,” or “This coffee tastes like sadness in liquid form.” You can also make it write product descriptions or summarize text, which means Excel just went from math teacher to part-time copywriter.

The brains behind this trick are GPT-4.1-mini from OpenAI, tucked right inside Excel. Microsoft swears that what you type stays private, so don’t worry, Excel won’t leak your awkward personal budget where “online shopping” is bigger than “rent.” Of course, there are some rules. You only get about 100 uses every 10 minutes, so don’t try to make Excel write your autobiography. It also only works with the data in your sheet, not the entire internet. And Microsoft says you shouldn’t use it for serious stuff like taxes, contracts, or anything involving jail time, because, let’s face it, sometimes the AI just makes things up.

This matters because Microsoft is sneaking AI into the stuff you already use every day. Instead of juggling apps, you can now get AI help right inside your spreadsheet. For businesses, that means faster reports. For managers, fewer hours staring at columns until they all look the same. For you, it means less grunt work and more time pretending to be busy while Excel quietly does your job.

But here’s the big question. Is Excel now your helpful new coworker, or is it slowly becoming your replacement? If a spreadsheet can already write, summarize, and organize, how much of your job was just clicking cells and dragging formulas anyway?

Would you trust Excel to handle your work, or does the idea of a “thinking” spreadsheet make you want to dust off a notebook and calculator instead?

- Matt Masinga