Have Copilot in Excel explain a formula for you

[GrahmSchneider13]

Greetings, this is the second in a series of posts this week that shows how you can get help from Copilot with the chat helper.  

Sometimes you may encounter an Excel formula that you are unsure about what it is doing. This can happen if you inherit a workbook from someone else, get a sample formula from a web search or even if you just forget something you wrote in the past. Copilot in Excel can help you to understand formulas. For example, given the formula =SUMIF(Table1[Region],"=West",Table1[Sales]), you could ask Copilot: 

Explain this formula to me: =SUMIF(Table1[Region],"=West",Table1[Sales]) 

Copilot analyzes the formula submitted in the prompt and returns this response that breaks down the different parts of the formula and provides an explanation. 

This formula sums the values in the "Sales" column of "Table1" where the corresponding "Region" column equals "West". SUMIF function checks each row in the "Region" column of "Table1" to see if it matches the criteria "West". If the "Region" is "West", the corresponding value in the "Sales" column is included in the sum. The total of all "Sales" values for the "West" region is then returned by the formula.

Try out Copilot in Excel with your formulas and stay tuned as we will be sharing 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.