Using Copilot for Excel to create a chart

[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. I have a table that has life expectancy figures by year for both men and women.

Life expectancy table with columns for Year, Sex and (Years)

With so much data it is hard to visualize it so I ask Copilot:

Create a line chart of average life expectancy by year, with one line for men and another line for women

Copilot in Excel pane with the above prompt and the returned chart showing average life expectancy by year, with one line for men and another line for women.

I click on the add to a new sheet button in the Copilot pane and this chart gets inserted into my workbook:

chart showing average life expectancy by year, with one line for men and another line for women.

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]

@EricPatterson 

Although I'm sure Copilot will become better at Excel in the future, this particular example doesn't really impress me. You write "with so much data ....". Really? Having only 230 rows (115 years for both female and male) in three columns isn't really "so much".

A simple pivot chart will do the trick in a matter of seconds. But then you might say, "What if you don't know anything about pivot charts?". True, then it would be better to use Copilot to teach the user what pivot charts are, how they work and how you can build them. Make people understand how they should structure their data etc.

And what puts me off a bit is that Copilot includes a comment "AI-generated content may be incorrect". Let's say we have a user who isn't very good at Excel who creates this chart. Without understanding the  mechanics, how can that user determine that the content is correct or not? 

No disrespect! It's exciting to follow the development of AI in Excel but from my perspective it's not there yet.