What can Copilot in Excel actually do for your firm?

Copilot in Excel lets you ask for formulas, summaries, charts and data cleanup in plain English, inside the spreadsheet your firm already lives in. You describe what you want ("add a column showing GST", "which clients are trending down this quarter") and Copilot builds the formula, chart or PivotTable for you and explains what it did. It needs a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence on top of your existing subscription, and it works best on clean, table-formatted data. For many Australian professional services firms it is the most accessible starting point for AI, because it lives inside a tool your whole team already uses every day.

What is Copilot in Excel?

Copilot in Excel is Microsoft's AI assistant built directly into Excel. It appears as a chat panel beside your worksheet, and instead of remembering function syntax or menu locations, you type what you want in ordinary language. According to Microsoft's own documentation, it helps you "create and understand formulas, analyse your data for insights" and highlight, sort and filter data on request.

The important mental shift is that Copilot is not a separate AI tool you have to open, paste data into and copy results back from. It works on the workbook in front of you. That removes the single biggest friction point we see when firms trial general-purpose chatbots for spreadsheet work: the constant shuffling of data in and out of the AI.

What can it actually do today?

The current capabilities fall into five practical buckets.

Writing and explaining formulas. Ask for a calculation in plain English and Copilot proposes the formula, including multi-condition functions like SUMIFS and XLOOKUP that many staff avoid because the syntax is fiddly. Just as usefully, you can point at an existing formula someone else wrote and ask Copilot to explain it step by step.

Sorting, filtering and highlighting. Instructions like "highlight every invoice over 90 days" or "filter to matters opened this financial year" are carried out directly on your data, without you hunting through conditional formatting menus.

Summaries and insights. Ask a question of your data and Copilot returns answers as charts, PivotTables, trend summaries or flagged outliers. This is the "give me a first look at this dataset" use case, and it is where most firms get their first genuine wow moment.

Cleaning messy data. Removing duplicates, fixing inconsistent naming and standardising formats is dull work that consumes a surprising amount of admin time in most practices. Copilot handles a good deal of it on request.

Pulling in data. Copilot can bring in information from files saved in OneDrive or SharePoint, so a summary tab can draw on source workbooks without manual re-keying.

Microsoft has also been steadily deepening the analysis side, including Python-powered analysis for heavier data work, though for most firms the everyday value sits squarely in the five buckets above.

What would a professional services firm actually use it for?

The honest answer is: the spreadsheets you already have. Some examples from the work we see across Australian firms:

• Accountants and bookkeepers use it to interrogate management accounts and client data exports, build variance summaries and produce first-draft charts for client meetings.
• Law firms point it at WIP, disbursements and matter listings, asking questions like which matter types are slowest to bill or which fee earners have ageing WIP.
• Architects and project-based firms use it on fee proposals and project budget trackers, flagging projects drifting over budget before month end.
• Practice managers everywhere use it on debtors, utilisation and capacity spreadsheets, the reports that get built the same painful way every month.

The pattern is consistent: Copilot in Excel shines on recurring internal reporting, the work nobody bills for but everybody has to do.

What does it cost and what do you need?

Copilot in Excel is not included in a standard Microsoft 365 subscription. It requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on licence, which currently sits at around US$30 per user per month billed annually, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 business or enterprise plan. It is not included by default even in the top-tier enterprise plans, so check what your firm is actually licensed for before assuming anyone has it.

Two practical requirements matter more than the licence:

1. Your files need to live in OneDrive or SharePoint rather than a local drive or ageing file server, because Copilot works on cloud-saved workbooks.
2. Your data needs to be structured, ideally formatted as an Excel table with one header row and no merged cells. Clean data in, useful answers out.

For a firm of ten people, licensing everyone is a real spend. Many firms sensibly start with a handful of licences for the people who live in spreadsheets, prove the value, then expand.

Where does it fall short?

Copilot in Excel is genuinely useful, but it is not magic, and firms should go in clear-eyed.

It can struggle with very large datasets, and it dislikes messy structures like merged cells and blank rows inside tables. Independent reviewers have also found it can occasionally produce summaries with errors or formulas that run without doing quite what you intended, so every output that matters needs a human check, exactly as you would review a junior's work. Feature availability also varies a little between Excel on Windows, Mac and the web, so two staff members may see slightly different options.

None of this is a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to treat Copilot as a fast, capable assistant whose work gets reviewed, not an oracle whose answers get forwarded straight to clients.

How to start this week

You do not need a firm-wide rollout to find out whether this earns its keep. A sensible first fortnight looks like this:

1. Confirm with your IT provider whether anyone in the firm has a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and if not, license one or two spreadsheet-heavy people.
2. Pick one recurring internal report, move the workbook to OneDrive or SharePoint, and format the data as a table.
3. Rebuild this month's version of that report by asking Copilot for the summaries, formulas and charts, and time how long it takes against the usual manual process.
4. Have the normal owner of that report review the output line by line.

If the time saving is real on one report, it will be real on twenty.

Getting your whole team past the trial stage

The gap between one person experimenting with Copilot and a firm actually banking the time savings is training and habit, not technology. That is exactly the gap Jork Training exists to close. Our live sessions show professional services teams how to use tools like Copilot and Claude on the actual documents and spreadsheets their roles revolve around, and our in-house programs build firm-wide capability rather than leaving AI to one enthusiastic early adopter.

Browse our upcoming webinars for live sessions relevant to your sector, or learn more about in-house AI training for your firm if you want your whole team moving at once.