Grouping dates by quarter using Copilot in Excel

[EricPatterson]

Hi everyone, over the last few weeks we have had a series of posts to show you some of the things that are possible to do with Copilot in Excel. Today I will start with a (fictional) list of books and book sales. I would like to group sales by quarters to see the impact on my business.

Table of book sales with columns for Book Id, Release date, Author, Category, Publishing Branch, User Rating and Sales

I ask Copilot:

I want to see sales by quarter based on the release date

Copilot in Excel pane showing the above prompt and the response showing a chart of Sales by year and quarter of release date as well as the text summary below.

The total sales by quarter based on the release date are as follows: Q1: $1,599,100, Q2: $4,672,300, Q3: $36,100, Q4: $576,100. See the PivotChart above for more details.

I click on the “Add to a new sheet” button in the Copilot pane and this PivotTable and chart are inserted giving me the view of book sales by quarter that I was looking for.

Picture showing the PivotTable and Chart inserted on a new sheet with Book Sales by Quarter and year

Over the coming weeks I will continue to share more examples of what you can do with Copilot in Excel.

Thanks for reading,

Microsoft Excel Team

*Disclaimer: If you try these types of prompts and they do not work as expected, it is most likely due to our gradual feature rollout process. Please try again in a few weeks.

[#2]

Excel Team,
This is a fantastic series. I have tested them all out and am using your examples to train our pilot group who are testing copilot. It would be great if the example data could be copied to make test the prompt easier.
Keep up the great work.
Christine Stack

[#3]

Thanks Christine, I'll work on a way to make the data more accessible.

Update: I have attached the file to the latest post

-Eric

[#4]

Hi Cristine, you may also find this information helpful: http://aka.ms/Copilot/ExcelGetStarted