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Microsoft 365 Insider Blog

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Query your local Excel files with Copilot Chat

Prash_MSFT

Microsoft

Feb 24, 2026

Hi, Insiders! I am Prash Shirolkar, a Product Manager on the Excel team. I’m excited to share that you can now query modern Excel workbooks (like .xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm, .ods) stored locally on your dev...

Updated Feb 24, 2026

Version 4.0

copilot

excel

Prash_MSFT

Microsoft

Joined September 20, 2016

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Microsoft 365 Insider Blog

Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Insider blog! Get updates and insights about Microsoft 365 features as they release to preview channels on Windows, the web, Mac, iOS, and Android.
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Prash_MSFT

Microsoft

Feb 24, 2026

Thanx for reaching out Peter and AntP91!

A network share does qualify as locally stored as well.
This capability is available with Copilot Chat and for a list of eligible M365 Subscriptions where it is available please refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/manage#microsoft-365--chat-eligibility

thanx,
Prash

PeterForster

Steel Contributor

Feb 24, 2026

Prash_MSFT Thank you for the response. This raises a follow‑up question: The data is now transferred to the cloud, correct? Users working on local files need to be aware that parts of the data—or potentially all of it—will be sent to the Orchestrator in the backend. I appreciate this feature, but from a data governance perspective, how does this process operate in the background, and can we disable this functionality for compliance reasons?