Introducing the new Get Data dialog in Excel for Windows
We are excited to announce a first step towards modernizing Power Query in Excel for Windows - a new way to connect to data that will make finding and using external data sources faster and more intuitive! The modern Get Data dialog gives you a clean, simple starting point for connecting to data. With built-in search and quick access to popular data sources, you can easily find the right source and start working on your data. How it works Select the Data tab on the ribbon, then select Get Data > Get Data (Preview) to open the new dialog. Browse through popular data sources on the Home tab or use the search bar to find a specific source. Select the New tab under the categories list on the left to browse through all available data sources. What it does When you open the modern Get Data dialog, you’ll be able to search for the connector you need or pick from recommended options—all in one clean view. When you select a source, Excel takes you straight into the familiar, current Power Query import flow and you’ll be able to see the same steps you know today. For more information, check out modern Get Data Dialog in Excel for Windows. Note: You can still import external data from the Get Data dropdown categories as well as from the new Get Data dialog. More to come The new dialog is the first step toward a modernized Power Query experience in Excel, paving the way for upcoming innovations like modern import flows and a modern Power Query editor. In addition, you’ll see more modules integrated into this dialog soon, making it easier than ever to discover, connect, and prepare your data. Availability This feature is gradually rolling out to M365 subscribers in Excel for Windows, with Version 2509 Build 16.0.19328.20000 or later. Feedback We’d love to hear about your experience with the modern Get Data dialog. Let us know: ✔️ Did the overall experience feel intuitive and helpful? ✔️ Which new additions would you like to see? Just click on the 🙂button in the upper right-hand side of the dialog to share your feedback. Your feedback helps us refine the experience and prioritize what’s next.What's New in Excel (November 2025)
Welcome to the November 2025 update. This month, we’re excited to share several enhancements across Excel. Announced at Ignite, Agent Mode in Excel now includes web search and Anthropic model support, and is available in Excel for Windows—via the Frontier program. Excel for Windows introduces a modernized Get Data dialog, providing a clean, simple starting point for connecting to data. Additionally, users on Windows, web, and iOS can preview comments on protected files directly in email notifications. For Insider users, Excel for iOS adds Liquid Glass styling and template filters, introducing a new, modern home experience. Excel for Windows: - Agent Mode in Excel enhancements (Frontier) - Get Data dialog Excel for Windows, web, and iOS: - Comment previews on protected files #FIA Excel for iOS: - Liquid Glass and template filters (Insiders) Excel for Windows Agent Mode in Excel enhancements (Frontier) 1. Web search. At Ignite last week, we introduced web search in Agent mode. Imagine pulling real-time information from the web straight into your spreadsheet workflows—market trends, historical stats, scientific figures—without juggling browser tabs or copy/pasting from a chat window. For example, you can ask Agent Mode to compile the latest GDP growth and CO₂ emissions data for G20 countries or create a table of this year's Nobel Prize winners with detailed attributes. Copilot can now pull this data from trusted sources into Agent mode's multi-step workflow and build directly in your spreadsheet, saving time and reducing manual effort. Plus, it supports citation links for transparency so you can have confidence in the output. This integration is perfect for analysts, researchers, and anyone who needs up-to-date external data to make informed decisions. 2. Anthropic model support. Choice matters, and we are committed to providing multi-model options in Microsoft 365. Building on Researcher agent and Copilot Studio, Agent mode now offers an option to choose Anthropic’s Claude models to power your experience. Just choose the "Try Claude" option to get started. For enterprise users: your admin must allow access to Anthropic AI models. Learn more about using Claude in Agent mode in Excel. Claude brings a different approach to spreadsheet generation offering a distinct experience from the default OpenAI models powering Agent Mode. While Claude streams its chain-of-thought and explanations differently, ongoing improvements aim to deliver a smooth experience in this early preview. This flexibility ensures you can pick the model that best fits your needs—whether it’s speed, accuracy, or style. 3. Now available in Excel for Windows. Last month, we introduced Agent mode in Copilot in Excel for Web through the Frontier program. At Ignite, we announced that Agent mode is now available in Excel for Windows too, making AI assistance available for users and professionals who rely on Excel in the desktop app for their work. While Mac support is planned for later, Windows users will benefit immediately from this rollout. Users must be in the Insiders Beta Channel on Windows. Get Data Dialog The modern Get Data dialog gives you a clean, simple starting point for connecting to data. With built-in search and quick access to popular data sources, you can easily find the right source and start working on your data. This feature is currently rolling out to Windows Current Channel users. Read more here > Excel for Windows, web, and iOS Comment previews on protected files #FIA Excel now lets you preview comments on protected files directly from your email notifications. When someone adds a comment, the email includes the comment text and its context within the file, so you can quickly review feedback without unlocking or opening the document. Excel for iOS Liquid Glass and template filters (Insiders) Your favorite Microsoft 365 apps on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro now feature Liquid Glass styling. We’ve also made the search experience available from the bottom of the screen, to align with iOS 26’s search patterns and make it easier to use with one hand. When searching for templates, you’ll now also see quick filter buttons at the top that let you browse by category – like Flyers, Resumes, or Invoices – instead of scrolling through a single long list, so finding the perfect template is faster and more intuitive. Read more here > Check if a specific feature is in your version of Excel Click here to open in a new browser tab Many of these features are the result of your feedback. THANK YOU! Your continued Feedback in Action (#FIA) helps improve Excel for everyone. Please let us know how you like a particular feature and what we can improve upon—"Give a compliment" or "Make a suggestion".. You can also submit new ideas or vote for other ideas via Microsoft Feedback. Subscribe to our Excel Blog and the Insiders Blog to get the latest updates. Stay connected with us and other Excel fans around the world – join our Excel Community and follow us on X, formerly Twitter. Special thanks to our Excel MVPs David Benaim, Bill Jelen, Alan Murray, and John Michaloudis for their contribution to this month's What's New in Excel article. David publishes weekly YouTube videos and regular LinkedIn posts about the latest innovations in Excel and more. Bill is the founder and host of MrExcel.com and the author of several books about Excel. Alan is an Excel trainer, author and speaker, best known for his blog computergaga.com and YouTube channel with the same name. John is the Founder & Chief Inspirational Officer at MyExcelOnline.com where he passionately teaches thousands of professionals how to use Excel to stand out from the crowd.New in Excel for the web: Power Query Refresh & Data Source Settings for authenticated data sources
We’ve reached yet another milestone in Excel for the web: Power Query Refresh is now generally available for queries sourcing data from selected authenticated data sources. As we released the ability to refresh Power Query data from anonymous data sources (link), it was only a matter of time until we added the ability to refresh Power Query data from authenticated data sources, which are the majority of data sources used, and require users to enter credentials. This milestone also enables us to release Import with Copilot to Excel for the Web (following Win32 and Mac), as it relies on Power Query for refreshing data. Getting started These new functionalities are available to all users on Excel for the Web. See this support article for more information on Power Query data sources in Excel versions. efresh a data source in Excel for the web using Power Query Refreshing Power Query queries You can now refresh the Power Query queries in your workbook that source data from a selection of authenticated data sources: Select the Data tab > then choose Refresh All Open the Queries Pane > then select Refresh When you refresh a query, if authentication is needed, you can select the relevant method – anonymous, user and password, or your organizational account. For example, to refresh organizational data, select the respective method: Your user will be automatically identified (you can also switch it, if needed), so you can easily click “Connect” to continue the refresh process. The list of supported connectors includes: SharePoint* files (Excel workbooks, TXT, CSV, XML, JSON, PDF) SharePoint* folders SharePoint Online List SharePoint List SQL Server Database OData Feed Web API IBM Db2 Database PostgreSQL Database Azure SQL Database Azure Synapse Analytics Azure HDInsight (HDFS) Azure Blob Azure Table Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 1 Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 Azure Data Explorer Dataflows Dataverse Microsoft Exchange Online Dynamics 365 (Online) Salesforce Objects Salesforce Reports *SharePoint/OneDrive for work or school The refresh happens behind the scenes so you can keep editing the workbook while refreshing. Note: There is a limit for 1000 data source credentials. For example, if you connect to the same data source with 2 different users, it counts as 2.. Managing queries using Data Source Settings You can now view and manage data source credentials for the Power Query queries in your workbook using Data Source Settings: Select the Data tab > then choose 'Data Source Settings’. Choose between ‘Current Workbook’ and ‘Global Permissions’ to view and manage data sources credentials in the current workbook or across all workbooks, respectively. To delete the credentials stored for a data source, click on the ‘Delete’ button. To edit the credentials stored for a data source, click on the ‘Edit credentials’ button. In addition, we’re introducing a new functionality in Data Source Settings – authenticating to a data source that exists in the workbook from within the dialog: Select the Data tab > then choose ‘Data Source Settings’. Navigate to ‘Current Workbook’. Click on the ‘Add credentials’ button: What’s next? Future plans include releasing the full Power Query Editor experience to Excel for the Web. Feedback We hope you like this new addition to Excel and we’d love to hear what you think about it! Let us know by using the Feedback button in the top right corner in Excel - add #PowerQuery in your feedback so that we can find it easily. Want to know more about Excel for the web? See What's new in Excel for the web and subscribe to our Excel Blog to get the latest updates. Stay connected with us and other Excel fans around the world – join our Excel Community and follow us on Twitter. Jonathan Kahati, Gal Zivoni ~ Excel TeamA new way to debug formulas from Excel Labs
Have you ever found yourself tangled in a web of complex Excel formulas, desperately trying to pinpoint the source of an error? Fret no more! The latest experiment from Excel Labs is a new formula debugger, available within the Advanced Formula Environment (AFE). Getting started The debugging capabilities are activated using the new button on the Grid page in AFE. When the button is activated the debugger will be visible in the same editing pane, and you are ready to go! Key features Here are some of the key features to look out for: - Live debugging The debugger updates as you type, making it quick to explore how different variations of a formula are evaluated. - Evaluation steps Each evaluation step is shown, with highlights and underlines making it easy to see what changed at every step. - Range preview View a preview of the grid when hovering over a reference. Previews show the surrounding context to make it easier to navigate. - LAMBDA debugging Debug LAMBDA formulas, such as SalesForBestCategory, shown below. Every function call is contained in an expandable card. This lets you dive into the particular functions you are interested in, to see how they evaluate. Function support Not all functions are supported just yet. If a function or scenario is blocking your work, we would love to hear about it! In case you missed it: Sheet-defined functions Another experimental feature in the advanced formula environment is the ability to automatically convert a multi-cell calculation into a function, also known as sheet-defined functions. This capability has been part of AFE for a while, but in case you missed it – here is a brief overview. Often, we find ourselves spreading a complex calculation over many cells, like this one, that extracts an ID from a piece of text. After writing the calculation we are either faced with many intermediate cells, or we must roll the formulas into a single mega-formula. With AFE and the “Add function from grid” feature, we can automatically convert these formulas into a tidy function using three simple steps: First, select the range containing the formulas that will make up the function. Then click the “Add function from grid” button and provide the references that will define the inputs and outputs. Sometimes, AFE can automatically detect the inputs and outputs based on the dependencies. Finally, AFE will present you with the generated function that combines the formulas in the range. If you use labels adjacent to formulas, AFE can also use those to generate friendly parameter names, like Text or After. How to access The debugger will be pushed to Excel Labs automatically and there is no need to explicitly update the add-in. If you do not have Excel Labs, you can install the add-in from the Office store. Follow this link.Building Agent Mode in Excel
Excel is the world’s most trusted canvas for working with data, powering everything from household budgets to Fortune 500 companies, scientific research, operational planning, and classroom learning. It’s where millions turn to think, plan, and build. Agent Mode takes that impact even further, unlocking expert-level capabilities and making advanced analysis, modeling, and automation approachable for everyone, across every domain. Agent Mode lets you describe a task in natural language and then works with you to plan, reason, iterate, and validate the outcome. After introducing Copilot in Excel, it quickly became clear that our users wanted more — richer insights and more direct action on the sheet. Agent Mode aims to deliver on these expectations with a resilient experience that works across domains and data shapes, taking meaningful action directly in your workbook. We’ve developed Agent Mode to take advantage of the full richness of Excel artifacts, including table structures, formula syntax, dynamic arrays, PivotTables, charts, and more. It can create workbooks that are refreshable, auditable, and verifiable. This leap is powered by advances in our reasoning engine and the deeper expression of Excel as a rich modeling language. These breakthroughs allow Agent Mode to not only generate and execute solutions but also evaluate results, fix issues, and repeat the process until the outcome is verified. SpreadsheetBench instructions and obtained an accuracy rate of 57.2%. In our testing environment, Agent Mode makes direct workbook modifications via Excel APIs in a JavaScript runtime. We measure accuracy using the script provided by the SpreadsheetBench authors that grades output using the open-source openpyxl library. For evaluation on Claude and Shortcut.aI, we manually ran the SpreadsheetBench tasks (including answer location information needed for reliable evaluation) and downloaded the Excel files that were produced. These downloaded files were then graded using the same evaluation script provided by the SpreadsheetBench authors. Note that our evaluation with Claude completed on 895 of 912 instructions. Accuracy numbers were calculated using only completed tasks. All OpenAI benchmark results were originally published by OpenAI here. We measure Agent Mode on both our internal evaluation sets and the public SpreadsheetBench benchmark. Our results on SpreadsheetBench place Agent Mode at the leading edge of current systems, accurately completing 57.2% of the benchmark’s tasks. But we want to be clear: we don’t optimize for benchmarks, we optimize for real user jobs in Excel. That means solving messy, ambiguous, and complex tasks that reflect how people actually work. And while SpreadsheetBench is a strong signal, it doesn’t capture everything that makes Excel powerful — like dynamic arrays, PivotTables, charts, and formatting — or the customer need for refreshable, auditable, and verifiable solutions. That’s why we have also developed internal evaluation sets, AI grading, and user feedback loops to guide improvements. We also acknowledge that we have plenty of room for improvement, particularly around things like formatting and presentation-worthy layouts. But we believe our foundation is strong, and the direction is clear: Agent Mode is here to make Excel more powerful, more intuitive, and more helpful than ever before. Designing an Intelligent Spreadsheet Agent At the center of Agent Mode is a reasoning and reflection loop — powered by the latest generation of advanced reasoning models — that can interact directly with Excel workbooks. Rather than jumping straight into action, our system generates model-ready context from a given workbook and leverages an advanced reasoning model to begin planning for a given task. The system then interacts with the workbook by writing and executing code to carry out that plan, reflecting on the results, and evaluating whether the outcome matches the intent. If gaps remain, the loop continues: revising the strategy, pulling in additional context, and exploring alternative approaches. This cycle of planning, execution, and reflection continues until the system determines the task is complete. By combining planning with reactivity, the agent can chart a path, adjust when needed, and ultimately deliver solutions that feel intentional and well thought out. The reasoning engine of our system architecture is model-agnostic by design, allowing for rapid integration of new models as they become available. Loose coupling between our reasoning and workbook interaction layers allow us to quickly swap in and evaluate new models. Managing spreadsheet context Excel workbooks are living systems. They're often large, constantly changing, and filled with rich objects like PivotTables, slicers, and charts. For an agent, trying to absorb every detail all at once is simply impractical. Passing the entire dataset into context, along with the metadata for every object, would overwhelm any current model. Even exposing the thousands of read APIs Excel provides is far too heavy-handed. Instead, the agent approaches the workbook strategically: it pulls in just the pieces of context it needs, when it needs them, navigating the complexity step by step. This makes the agent not just a passive processor of data, but an active explorer of your workbook’s inner workings. To enable this selective exploration, we’ve developed a document context producer that operates within a coordinated push-and-pull system. On the push side, the document context producer proactively sends a compact “blueprint” of the workbook along with the user’s prompt — a summary of spatial layout, values, objects, and the formula dependency graph — encoded as JSON for complex objects and Markdown for tabular data. When deeper inspection is required, the reasoning engine can then request and pull additional information on demand, ensuring it can always operate with the context it needs. This hybrid design balances completeness with efficiency and lays the foundation for future improvements around caching, indexing, and search that will make context retrieval faster and more robust. Engineering domain knowledge of Excel Managing context gives the agent a clear view of the workbook. The next challenge is action: knowing which of Excel’s thousands of functions and APIs to call to get the job done. Excel spans thousands of API controls, including formulas, objects, and advanced features — a surface far too large for any current model to memorize or control directly. Instead of brute-forcing that complexity, we built distilled documentation into our reasoning engine — a compact, structured reference of Excel functions, objects, and specialized tool calls. Agent Mode can draw on this distilled knowledge to execute sophisticated tasks like building PivotTables, charts, slicers, and financial models. By embedding only the essential information, the model gains expert-level fluency in Excel’s internal workings without overwhelming its context window, enabling accurate reasoning across the full feature set of the application. Validation-driven generation In developing and evaluating our core coding and reflection loop, we observed that many spreadsheet errors are silent — formulas return values, but subtle mistakes remain hidden until they cascade into bad analysis. Relying on a single execution step is risky when the goal is trustworthy automation. To counter this, Agent mode in Excel reframes each tool call as an auditable, verifiable workflow. Before executing an action, our reasoning engine first generates lightweight tests to establish expected outcomes. These checks act as verifiable guardrails, ensuring that each step can be inspected and reproduced. Crucially, rather than hardcoding values, Agent Mode carries out all computations directly on the grid. This preserves the full dependency structure of the spreadsheet, allowing users to audit intermediate results, trace formulas, and verify correctness at every stage. Across our quantitative evaluations, we have been able to drive double-digit accuracy improvements with this validation-infused approach. Scaling quality with AI graders As we evolve Agent Mode into a deeply integrated, context-aware companion for data workflows, AI graders have emerged as one of the most critical technical enablers driving quality, trust, and usability. They serve not only as evaluators of accuracy but also as definers of excellence—ensuring that results are not just correct, but also useful, complete, relevant, and delightful. Graders are the mechanism through which we translate abstract quality goals into measurable, actionable standards. In Agent mode, they underpin both offline evaluation pipelines and live user experience metrics, helping us answer key questions like: Did Agent Mode fulfill the user’s intent? Was the output accurate and verifiable? Did the result feel native to Excel? Was the experience satisfying and accessible? Without graders, we would risk optimizing for superficial metrics — like response time or token count—while missing the deeper signals of user success. Looking ahead An early preview of Agent Mode in Excel is available starting today via the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed customers and Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscribers (under the Microsoft Services Agreement). Agent Mode works in Excel on the web and is coming soon to desktop. To try it, look for Agent Mode in the Tools menu of Copilot in Excel. Learn more about it in our announcement blog. This preview is just the beginning of our journey. We’re continuing to build a complete, M365 integrated experience that is trustworthy, reliable, and transparent — one that you can depend on for critical work. And from a developer perspective, we’re exploring extensibility solutions that would allow customers and partners to build custom solutions on top of our Agent Mode capabilities. Over the coming weeks and months, we plan to fully integrate and iterate on this experience across all Excel clients. We’ll continue to improve core output quality, refine the Agent Mode interfaces in chat and on the grid, and incorporate user feedback to ensure the experience feels at home in Excel, while unlocking entirely new ways to model, analyze, and automate.What's New in Excel (October 2025)
This month, look for Agent Mode in Excel (Frontier) in the Tools menu of Copilot for Excel. Additionally, PivotTable #SPILL and accessibility assistant updates are now available to Insider users on Windows and Mac. Formula by Example has also rolled out to the Current Channel for Excel on Windows.
