Copilot in Excel: Transforming Nonprofit Data Management

What is Microsoft Copilot in Excel?

Copilot in Excel is like having a data expert built right into your spreadsheet. Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Copilot helps you ask questions about your data, automate routine tasks, and quickly generate reports — all without needing to be an Excel power user.

Instead of spending hours figuring out complex formulas or cleaning messy data, you can simply type what you need in plain English, and Copilot will assist you.

Why Should Nonprofits Care About Copilot in Excel?

Here’s how Copilot can help your nonprofit organization work smarter:

1. Save Valuable Time
   Nonprofits often juggle multiple roles. Copilot can help you automate repetitive tasks like summarizing data, creating charts, or forecasting trends, so you can shift your attention to fundraising, community impact, or delivering services.
2. Turn Data into Insights
   Donor information, grant reporting, volunteer hours — nonprofits manage lots of data. Copilot can help you quickly find patterns, identify trends, or generate reports that tell your story in a compelling way to funders, board members, or stakeholders.
3. Simplify Complex Excel Tasks
   Not every nonprofit has a data analyst on staff. Copilot makes Excel easier to use, even for those without advanced spreadsheet skills. Whether it’s generating pivot tables, calculating year-over-year growth, or cleaning up data sets, Copilot can help guide you step-by-step.
4. Support for Grant Writing & Impact Reporting
   Need to present data in a grant application or an annual report? Copilot can assist in summarizing key metrics, forecasting future trends, and creating visuals that clearly show your organization’s impact — helping you stand out to funders.

Real-World Example: Copilot at Work in a Nonprofit

Let’s say your nonprofit is managing a donor database in Excel. Instead of manually sorting donations by month and writing formulas to calculate totals and averages, you could simply ask Copilot:

• “Summarize total donations by month.”
• “Create a chart showing year-over-year donation growth.”
• “Highlight donors who gave more than $500 this year.”

In seconds, Copilot will help generate answers and even suggest next steps.

Getting Started with Copilot in Excel

Copilot is available as part of Microsoft 365, which many nonprofits may already use or have access to at discounted rates through Microsoft’s nonprofit program. Nonprofits receive 10 free Business Premium licenses through the program, including access to Excel! Copilot is also now available with a Family or Personal M365 subscription with the current allotment of 60 AI credits per month.

To get started:

• Make sure your organization is using a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Copilot.
• Open Excel and look for the Copilot icon at the top right.
• Start asking questions or giving tasks in natural language or take advantage of the pre-built prompts!

What Can You Ask Copilot in Excel? Pre-Built Prompts to Get You Started

To make things even easier, Copilot in Excel comes with built-in prompt suggestions, so you don’t have to start from scratch. These prompts are designed to help you tackle common Excel tasks quickly. Here are some of the most helpful ones for nonprofit use cases:

In this blog, I prompted Copilot to create an Excel file with 100 lines of sample data for a nonprofit use case.

If you prefer to use a larger sample dataset you can download the workbook below. Just keep in mind that the dataset is a financial dataset specific to sales.

Download the Financial Sample Excel workbook for Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

1. Create Formulas: Suggest a Formula Column

Copilot can automatically suggest formulas based on the data in your table. For example, if you have donation dates and amounts, Copilot might suggest a formula to calculate "Donation Year-to-Date Totals" or "Donor Lifetime Value."

Example:
After selecting the Create Formulas pre-built prompt for the sample data I generated for a nonprofit use case, Copilot suggested the following formula:

“Looking at A1:M1001, here's 1 formula column to review and insert in Column N: Donation Status2 — Classifies each donation as 'High' or 'Low' based on whether the donation amount exceeds 1000 (dollars).”

2. Understand: Summarize Using PivotTables or Charts

Copilot can help you make sense of your data by generating PivotTables and visual charts to highlight patterns and trends. PivotTables are one of Excel’s most powerful tools — but they often intimidate non-technical users. Copilot takes the guesswork out.

Example:
After selecting the Understand pre-built prompt for the sample data given above, Copilot generated the following:

“I analyzed data in A1:J1001, and here's what I found:”

3. Advanced Analysis: Get Deeper Analysis Results Using Python

For nonprofits with more technical needs or data-heavy projects, Copilot integrates with Python right inside Excel. This means you can perform advanced data analysis, forecasting, or statistical modeling without leaving your spreadsheet.

Example:
After selecting the Advanced analysis pre-built prompt for the sample data given above, Copilot suggested that I give more details on what kind of analysis I wanted and of what data. I asked it to add a trend line to donation data over the past year.

4. Apply Color and Formatting: Highlight All Cells with [Incomplete] in Red

Copilot can also help with data formatting and cleaning — a common time-drain for many nonprofit teams. You can automate conditional formatting to flag certain data points visually.

Example:
After selecting the Apply Color and Formatting prompt, I asked Copilot to highlight all donation amounts under 500 in red.

This makes your spreadsheets cleaner, more readable, and easier to present to internal or external stakeholders.

Why These Prompts Matter for Nonprofits

These ready-to-use prompts can help nonprofits:

• Speed up data analysis even if they don’t have a dedicated data team.
• Prepare reports faster for funders, board members, or stakeholders.
• Gain insights to make better programmatic and fundraising decisions.

Final Thoughts

Nonprofits don’t have time or resources to waste. With Copilot in Excel, you can streamline data tasks, reduce manual work, and make data-driven decisions with confidence — all while focusing more energy on your mission and community.