The topic Excel’s Copilot finally tackles the nightmare of sorting through your… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
There’s a lot of debate about where AI should and shouldn’t be in the workplace, but one area I always advocate using AI for is for doing really laborious tasks that an LLM is designed to perform extremely quickly. And one thing an AI can do much faster than us is churn through a huge chunk of data and create a summary based on its findings.
If you’ve ever been faced with a huge Excel spreadsheet and want someone (or something) to sum up all the data for you, then you’re in luck. Microsoft is working on a Copilot integration that can review large blocks of text and summarise them for you.
You can check out the details for yourself over on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, filed under the title “Excel: Summarize text columns with Copilot.” The roadmap’s main intent is to give enterprises a heads-up as to what’s on the horizon, giving them time to adapt to the changes before they arrive. However, it also makes for an excellent place to get sneak peeks into what the Redmond giant is planning.
Copilot can analyze columns of text to generate related categories or tags. for example, Copilot will find the main themes in survey responses from open-ended questions.
The description is oddly light, but we can infer a lot based on what LLMs can do. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to believe that Copilot can scan hundreds of responses where people were allowed to write whatever they wanted and pluck out the recurring trends in just a few seconds. And there’s a good chance you can then ask follow-up questions about the data to get a clearer image as to what the survey responders wanted.
The feature is still under development, but Microsoft hopes to get it out sometime in July 2026, with a scheduled release for Excel on the web, desktop, and macOS.