Microsoft Copilot - Excel has forever changed 

“Hey, Copilot, I’m late to the meeting. Did anyone mention me?” “Yes, John said ‘Surprise! Jeremy is late again. Man, that guy needs to go.’ and Karen said ‘Keep this between us, but Sue in HR has already got the paperwork ready and they are just waiting on him to finish his current task so we don’t get screwed over.’”

I’ve had the same experience using Copilot in Excel. Copilot in Teams meetings is probably the most capable at this time.

Interesting insights on co-pilot! The potential for automating tasks in Microsoft apps is promising. However, the data limitations in Excel and the need for cloud storage are notable drawbacks. Looking forward to seeing how co-pilot evolves in future versions. 👍

Thanks Luke. Have been watching your videos. Very good work.

Thank you for the analysis Luke, wanted to try it out myself and this saved me a lot of time.

I just discovered your channel now and I'm really liking your style 🤓

6:12 the reason why it didn’t generate a response, it’s likely due to you overflowing its context window. For LLMs such as GPT-4, the context window is similar to a computer’s RAM -in the sense that they act similarly-. This context window is measured in “tokens”. GPT-4 has 8K, 32K and 128K tokens. Not sure which model you’re using with co-pilot but 8K is about 20 pages of text, 32K is about 75 pages of text and 128K is about 300 pages of text. That’s for one whole interaction. And the models at any given case can only generate about 4K tokens worth of a response, that also counts against your context window.

Just like GTP4, with a lot of absurd limitations! Great video!

Thanks Luke, great info as usual. I'd be so dissapointed if I had forked out $20 for CoPilot and it wasn't able to analyse my data and actually cost me time rather than saved me time. It's going to be great - just not yet. Very glad to see it will be available for Mac though.

Good to have confirmation it's not just me that found the excel functionality very limited. It seems like a dream come true, on paper, but then I found I could get whatever insights I want faster manually most of the time.

Appreciate the honest and transparent work. Saves me a lot of time.

That was an AWESOME video, practical, engaging with great real world data and humor, thanks man! !!

Changed forever? Not quite. I’ve been using it for months and I can assure you it is completely overhyped. I’m sure it’ll improve over time, but has a way to go.

This vid had me cracking up. Thank you for this summary.

Thank you for this, not enough videos showing capabilities and drawbacks out there.

"Excel has forever changed" Video : "i'm disappointed it doesn't work"

Great video as usual - all my questions answered without having to spend hours playing around myself.

Great vid again, so nice to see the latest news explained like this, this way you know what to subscribe to or better wait a while (or forget about it) but hoping copilot is gonna work because of it’s MS connection

I mean, you have a data with 40k rows you might as well use Python or R to make your analysis. Excel and any sheets app is only capable of performing well until certain point.

The first half of the video provides a good overview of the functionality Copilot provides across the various Microsoft apps.

It has pretty long way to go annnndddd that's the amount of time we data nerds have to established ourselves coz once the copilot is mature enough with no surprise there will be job cut for these small small works.

Thank you, it was very objective and revealing.

Great video! I wanted to ask how you went about collecting,organizing and maintaining the job data.

Thanks Luke for the video

Thanks for making this video. You basically helped me see I don't need CoPilot right now. But maybe when they improve it later. :)

According to my subscription information, I have copilot but it's not available in any of the programs - be it the browser version or in the desktop version. That being said, with regards to the limitations on data size, I'm not sure that needs to be a big hurdle. I'm 99% confident I'd get into trouble if I used it on the data we have at work (even with the stipulations about data protection etc.), so I'd be using co-pilot on dummy data anyway, and using it to aid in quickly getting good visualisations out of data that REALLY should not be in a spreadsheet to begin with (but in a database).

Great insights! Interesting to see the limits of this software. Seems like the context windows is still pretty small 😢

The new word has image creation capabilities.. will those be included in the copilot subscription or are there other ways to create images? I use image creation a lot to do sketches of landscapes and modify them at work

I would've almost subscribed it to trim my excel data, if I hadn't watched this video. I really appreciate your review!

9:36 the data issues is context window overflow due to bad prompting. You can use huge data sets as long as you indicate in your prompt what the AI should be looking for. If you tell it “column H and plot it against Column A” likely you’ll get a response. Also, to improve the output of these models, you need to improve your input. Your prompts seem vague and poor, gotta refine those to get better answers. Hit me up if you need help with this, I can help you navigate through it.

Thank you! I've been so looking forward to seeing actual use case and not promo videos.

Excel remains quite capable of sinking even good computers in terms of compute. The idea that people will offset gigantic data sets, and I'm kind of stupidly assuming there is some processing basis like a cell is a token (or something akin to that) - so if you have 100,000 x 10 row sheet, its a way larger issue than what is normally pushed to AI. For small business, where its perhaps small sheets, this might work out well in the present. I've got my reservations about larger data, and what I see in the enterprise where you get really crazy linking across massive, massive sheets. Its in these really large areas where AI would probably give the best return, but equally IMHO the heaviest AI workloads.

Thanks for sharing, very interesting.. the concern is about have sensitive data out there in the web

Amen and thank you. I just went through this.

Hi Luke, one question please. May I know if using Excel for personal plan would be enough for data analyst. Or do you recommend the business standard. Thank you

Loved the video...will keep an lookout for future Microsoft Copilot videos. I'm now Subscribed ! 🎉 👏

I haven't used copilot yet, and not sure if I can use copilot to its max potential, but I can already see a lot of features that really take off a lot of stress at work (I'm actually rooting for it because of the meetings summary feature, that would help a lot....)

Hi, does identify if there are duplicated numbers? Example if you have a list of Orders and Orderlines. Does it sum up correct and identify that it needs a unique count?

Can it clean your data?

Hey, Copilot, are you logging all of the data that passes through your entire system of software?

Do you know if i purchase the pro or business plan will i be able to use it across my personal and two business accounts in Microsoft 365. Or is the best way to just use it on my personal account and import data from the corporate accounts would rather not do this.

Great video Luke! I heard you have a MacBook Pro in your video. I have one as well and run into issues getting PyCharm working correctly with selenium webdriver. Do you know of any places I can look for getting a MacBook Pro set up for data science tasks? Thanks a bunch!!

It’s amazing how easy it was to find this information without copilot. I wonder if copilot is going to prevent us from actually looking up negative reviews of AI.

Is the copilot pro only available in Microsoft 365 apps or can someone having 2019 microsoft office use it as well?

This is revolutionary.

Thanks so much

1:29 Yes, I do just love when nobody turns on their cameras

Curious what would happen if you put your same dataset into PowerBI.

M365 Chat and Teams is useful. Also the MacOS apps have copilot as well. I run Parallels too but outside running it in edge. Or using edge browser on my iPhone, the Mac Apps have functioned the same.

Great; a much-needed video - thanks! The lack of data security with the pro version is a dealbreaker for me. Shame, because it looks useful. The reason for the limit in the number of records that the AI could handle is almost certainly because the non-business version has a limit on the number of tokens that can be submitted, versus the business version - same with the $20 paid version of ChatGPT vs the enterprise version of ChatGPT

Ask it to label the horizonal axis of the histogram with the midpoint of the bins rather than the range… i spent 20 min the other day trying to do this and couldnt figure that out. Curious if copilot can do it.

Wonder if Copilot's preview version cannot cope not only with data amounts but if it might not work properly in a VM/Parallels 🤔

Hey, thanks for sharing! How do I get access to copilot within microsoft 365?

Great video which yeah even enhanced search I mean Copilot on Bing/Edge still has issues and needs to be lead sometimes so I'm not surprised at it's ProFormance in this video that said... I normally use word for writing, notes and gamedev and powerpoint for timelines and excel once for a card game... So yeah it sounds good especly for $20 a month and I get some bonuses to the other Open ai bots to.

Sounds like (for now) you'll still likely need to do your own data analysis and insights work, but Copilot can at least save you time building out the deck and white paper.

Signed up for it then cancelled when I found that even with it enabled it was not showing up in Excel, Word, or Outlook. Even Copilot Pro itself couldn't tell me what was wrong. I gave up after twenty minutes of searching. Too bad I didn't see your video yesterday! But in any case, it seems like waiting until version 2 might not be a bad idea.

There should be only one co pilot for all github & ms office apps

Co pilot will make he a hero, and everyone else using it. The bar has been raised considerably.

No more googling formulas, Copilot's got my back now.

On large data sets You need to create a dimensional model using Power BI first. Which you can ask CoPilot to do…

Now I can go for a quick nap during meetings

How does all this interface with Fabric? Ir is that going to be a totally different thing?

Hey Copilot, Join the meeting and respond and contribute on my behalf. Do this for all future meetings...

It’s not at all surprising that the data size is limited. It’s using GPT-4 under the hood, it’s almost certainly converting it to a CSV and just passing it to a fine tuned GPT-4 model. If I remember correctly, the newest GPT-4 can handle 32k tokens, with a token generally being 3/4ths of a word. Now, I haven’t checked the embeddings or anything, but I suspect that it treats most numbers as 1 token per number, or perhaps 2 number pairs. Something like that. Anything with a decimal point is going to get its own token for that (or maybe paired with a single number). So I’d guess a number like 23,462.56 would eat up something like 5 tokens in the best case and 9 in the worst. If it’s 5 tokens. I didn’t check exactly what your lines were, but one of them was decently long JSON. So, let’s say you have 4 cells with numbers in it, 1 cell with a label (let’s call that 2 tokens), and 1 cell with JSON (let’s say that’s about 50 tokens). That’d be 72 tokens per line. Let’s round down to 64 (for easy math and to be generous). That’d give you 512 lines at most that it could keep in context. Hey, didn’t you say you could only do about 500 lines? Well, there you go. That’s why. Additionally, LLMs tend to have issues “remembering” things from the earlier parts (except the very beginning) of a message when generating the next token. They seem to remember the very beginning, and then the latest X portion of the conversation, and if the conversation exceeds X, even if it’s within the context length, you’re going to get worse answers if they needed to reference information in the portion between begin + C and end - X (where C is a very small number and X is a number that’s a very significant fraction of the total context length, like maybe 10 and 5000 or so.) We don’t have unlimited context length and not all data is created equal in terms of token efficiency. Excel data is probably among the least efficient, whereas word is likely extremely efficient, thus, you can get a lot more out of it in word than excel. (Plus, excel documents tend to be very large more often than word files, and way more often than PowerPoint). If we can get longer context lengths in the future, this will be less of an issue. Also, to some degree, this is using a hammer to put a screw into wood. LLMs are not calculators. They make terrible calculators. This is going to be a weakness. It must be using code in the background to do the calculations, because the LLM by itself would fail nearly every time.

Do M365 users get higher priority for compute power?

I don't think a million rows is what MS have in mind for the 'average user'. Especially if not some standard financial spreadsheet.

I tried it by the way and right now Copilot is saying one can not edit the pivot tables, or charts made from the pivot tables, so you have to ask it to edit the original data set ( Excel table you created in the beginning). Copilot implies it one may have the ability in the future to edit the pivot tables and charts.

I am planning to learn DATA analyst, with AI and new features ,do you think it is good time to learn it ?

Would be great if you could update this with a full working version of copilot thank

Is a subscription service. I dont think lot of companies will pay monthly 30 dollar per user?

Also, it puts the focus on the VALUE of the information. Mostly it's low. Very low.

Why did you need to use parallels to run office when you had just said this is available in the mac version?

Do you think that this is going to replace a lot of data analyst jobs, I just started learning and going through the google analytics certificate, but it seems that copilot just may do an entire data analyst job, not now of course but in the future.

"Copilot is just thinkin, and thinkin'..." [...ad interjects...] lol! That's when I'd have gone to refresh my coffee irl, anyway! :-D

Not sure what version of excel and copilot your using (maybe a future one that will change excel forever...) but been using it at work and its very weak

This actually seems crazy

Great video but really it should work large datasets and large files with 100K Context from GPT-4 Turbo now.

I am sure it could better handle data sets with fewer text columns.

Will Access also have Copilot?

Next level will be.. Me staying at home while copilot goes to work for me.

Wait, so if my files are on dropbox I'm doomed and cant use Copilot??

Windows 12 is currently rumoured to require 16GB minimum for system RAM, alongside the requirement of a 15th gen INTEL CPU which will come with an embedded NPU for using AI features such as Copilot natively on your system and in the windows shell.

Mistral is good at spreadsheets too.

Thanks for the video. At least we know that we should hold on and not pay for it now 😅

Can it use on win7?

CP also can't analyse several excel docs at the same time or several sheets in the same workbook - never mind a large single sheet with thousands of rows. Very, very limited. Copilot in Excel honestly seems (right now) like it might as well just have been made into an improved pivottable/chart wizard.

The problem with uploading files to OneDrive or a SharePoint server under Microsoft's control is that it violates contract clauses which restrict disclosure of intellectual property or other confidential data to third parties. Given that Microsoft employs foreign nationals, uploading certain types of data (much of which is commercial) can result in a violation of U.S. export control laws and regulations (which carry penalties of up to 20 years imprisonment and a $1,000,000 fine).

In the short term, tools like copilot on office look cool, however, in the long run, copilot will hamper employees ability to perform critical thinking, do out side of box thinking and problem solving, leading to cookie cutter solution to the most important business problems since those solutions will be built on top of ai suggested started point.

Imagine being a student now... Ina few years, no one will know a damn thing... The future is terrifying

It looks like copilot needs a larger NPU & more memory to work with bigger datasets.

Wait so, I expect that if I tell copilot "Can you write every 50 cells a series of text starting with Lot 1 in cell A2 so that Lot 2 is in A52, Lot 3 in A102 and so on and so forth" it will correctly help me sort my lots better. No chance?

If I subscribe to copilot do i get chatgpt plus as well?

+1 to the comments about simple cleaning up data. I'd like to know if you can dump in a bunch of things like name,address,email,phone on a single column and have it break those into separate columns without error. In simple data, that is fairly easy, but when some names have three words, rather than two, and the names are space-delineated, but the addresses are comma-delineated, it gets painfully time-consuming to do a simple task. I might have to get a single license for myself, to try the things I ask my office manager to do and see if it can help her with this annoying stuff.

love it

Is this like clippy?

what about with Github copilot?

I tried using Excel to chart my spending in different categories based on my credit card history ( about 200 rows). It kinda worked but also couldn't quite finish it. It would not ignore one category of data like I asked it to. It was making charts for me many times but kept including the category I wanted to exclude. Then after about 15 attempts, the response was " I am a large language model and can not make visual representations" >.... HUH? It was making charts , but then stopped. Is that Copilot telling me there is a limit to my attempts or do I need to get out my tin hat? Overall it works nicely, and I assume it and I will improve over time.

That's the future! It's really interesting how AI has changed the world just in the last year... I remember how everything started with the hype around Dall-e at the end of 2022, then Chat-GPT and GPT-3 were released to the public. From there it only took a couple weeks until everyone was using them. GPT-4 hit the market really hard and literally changed everything. Now after literally only one year with these large language models out everyone and even my grandmother know of theses AIs. To think that I can sit down and talk to my 82 year old not in the remotest techsavy grandmother about what AI has done to our world in the last year alone is astonishing. To think that my grandparents literally grew up in a small village in the middle of nowhere with literlly no electricty and a donkey as their main vehicle is really putting stuff in the frame. For them they went from middle ages to scifi in a whole lifetime. To think that in their lifetime they started without the concept of computers let alone microchips and to get to a point where you can literally have a computer talk to you is making me excited at to where the world will be when I am their age.

Well I'm officially obsolete, all hail our new Excel overlord Copilot!

Copilot can barely respond to simple questions let alone do any of this. It just stops working. This is currently the problem: these apps aren't reliable or trustworthy, so they actually make everything take longer if you care about your work.