Highlighting empty cells using Copilot for Excel

Greetings, We’re continuing our series of posts to show you some of the things that are possible to do with Copilot in Excel.

Today I will show you how you can use Copilot to highlight empty cells. I’ll start with a table of employees for Wingtip Toys (fictional). I have a long list and I need to make sure that I fill in all the rows with empty cells.

A table of employees with columns for Name, Address, City, State and Hire date.

I ask Copilot in Excel to: Highlight the rows in my table that have any missing values

Copilot in Excel pane showing the above prompt and a response for a conditional formatting rule to review and apply, with a button to apply the conditional formatting.

Sure! Looking at A1:E17, here's 1 conditional formatting rule to review and apply:

• Custom Formula: Apply a conditional format on cells in A2:E17 using the formula below
• Fill color: yellow
• Font color: black

• =OR(ISBLANK($A2), ISBLANK($B2), ISBLANK($C2), ISBLANK($D2), ISBLANK($E2))

I click on the apply button and get the following result:

Employee table showing 3 rows highlighted yellow that contain empty cells.

The conditional formatting makes it easy to see which rows need to be updated. Since it is conditional formatting, when I fill in the city in cell C3, the formatting on the row is automatically updated to remove the yellow fill.

Employee table showing Cell C3 selected with the city “Corona” filled in and the formatting updated to no longer highlight row 3.

Over the coming weeks I 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.