Forum Discussion
Copilot Unable to identify Cell Color
Hi,
I’ve encountered a problem with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel. Previously, Copilot was able to identify the color of specific cells in my workbook. For example, it successfully provided the color of cell G32 in a past file.
However, today, when I asked Copilot to check the color of cell in my current file, it failed and claimed that it cannot identify any color formatting.
This inconsistency is frustrating, and I’d like to understand why Copilot worked before but now cannot perform the same task. Has anyone else faced this issue? Is this a bug or a change in functionality?
I’d appreciate any insights or solutions.
3 Replies
Copilot currently has limited ability to interpret visual formatting such as cell background color, font color. Its understanding is based on data and formulas not visual cues. So if we are asking Copilot to highlight all red cells or summarize yellow rows it may not respond accurately unless that formatting is tied to a value or rule which it can interpret.
It's not an official functionality as I understand, same for creating and editing Excel spreadsheets through Copilot Chat. Our users experience intermittent issues with this and I have to advise them of this standpoint. Microsoft is just sending the request to OpenAI and if it comes back that it can do it, great, but sometimes not.
Microsoft should ideally block the ability to interact with spreadsheets through Copilot Chat until it's implemented fully, to avoid these intermittent issues.
Using a reasoning model may be more successful - such as Microsoft's Analyst agent (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365copilotblog/analyst-agent-in-microsoft-365-copilot/4397191) or ChatGPT o3/o3-mini (Tools > 'Think Longer'),
Copilot does not support recognition of cell background color, manually more comfortable.
