I know how to write Excel formulas, but I just don’t need to. Memorizing argument order for XLOOKUP or counting parentheses in a nested IF has never been the interesting part of working with data. Copilot in Excel now lets me describe what I need in plain English, and it handles the syntax. It’s not perfect, and it won’t replace knowing what your data should look like, but for the bulk of my daily spreadsheet work, I’ve stopped typing formulas. Here’s why that’s been easy to get used to.

Plain English is all Copilot needs to build a formula

The sidebar turns a sentence into a working column

The whole process starts from the Copilot button on the Home tab. Clicking it opens a chat panel on the right side of Excel. There’s one requirement before it does anything useful — it’s better to have your data formatted as an Excel Table, since Copilot relies on structured table references to read your columns correctly. It takes a few seconds through Insert > Table.

Once the panel is open, you type what you want in plain English. With a sales spreadsheet that has columns for Units Sold, Sales Amount, and Region, I asked Copilot to:

Add a column that calculates 5% commission on Sales Amount, and if the result is over $500, multiply it by 1.1.

It returned the exact IF structure I needed, placed it in the right column, applied it across every row, and included a short breakdown of how the formula works.

That’s the part worth emphasizing because you describe the outcome rather than the function. I didn’t mention IF in my prompt. Copilot picked the function based on what I asked for, which is how it should work. The preview also lets you check the output before committing, so nothing changes in your sheet until you approve it.

It doesn’t always nail the formula on the first attempt, especially with vague prompts. But even when it’s slightly off, editing a generated formula is faster than writing one from scratch. The key is being specific about what you want, and Copilot responds to clear instructions the same way any good tool does.

I used to dodge the nested formulas

Layered IFs, lookups, and date math in a single prompt

The formulas I always avoided were the layered ones where you’re nesting an IF inside another IF inside a LET, and one misplaced parenthesis breaks the whole thing. My sales spreadsheet has a Profit Margin column that does exactly this. It calculates the margin from Revenue and Units Sold, then labels it “High” if it’s above 0.3, “Medium” if above 0.15, and “Low” for everything else.

Writing that by hand means building a LET that stores variables, wrapping it around two nested IFs, and getting the closing parentheses right on the first try. I prompted Copilot with:

Add a column that calculates profit margin from Revenue and Units Sold, and labels it High above 30%, Medium above 15%, and Low for the rest.

It returned the correct structure. The same applies to lookups. Instead of remembering whether XLOOKUP needs the return array before or after the lookup array, I just tell Copilot what I want matched and where. It picks the right function and handles the argument order — which, frankly, is the part I always had to double-check anyway.

The new COPILOT function puts AI right inside a cell

It spills results like SORT, but takes natural language as input

The sidebar is useful, but the COPILOT function is something different. It’s a formula you type directly into a cell, just like SUM or XLOOKUP, except the first argument is a plain-English prompt. However, it requires premium Copilot features. The syntax looks like this:

=COPILOT("your prompt here", cell_reference)

The output spills into adjacent cells the same way dynamic array functions like UNIQUE or SORT do. However, the COPILOT function uses only workbook data and the model’s internal knowledge; for web-grounded queries, use Copilot Chat’s web mode.

It comes in handy with tasks that traditional formulas can’t handle cleanly. My sales spreadsheet has a Territory Analysis column, so I could have used =COPILOT("summarize sales performance for", B2, "based on revenue of", I2) to generate a short text summary for each region.

The function recalculates when the referenced cells change, so it behaves like any other formula in the workbook. You can also nest it inside IF or SWITCH if you want conditional AI output.

Microsoft caps it at 100 calls per 10 minutes. If you’re working with large datasets, passing an entire range in a single call counts as one use, but dragging the formula across rows counts as many. So, plan accordingly.

Copilot explains formulas I didn’t write and can’t read

Inherited spreadsheets stop being a black box

Everyone has opened a shared workbook and found a complex formula. My spreadsheet has one in Sheet2. It’s a REGEXREPLACE nested inside another REGEXREPLACE that strips non-numeric characters from phone numbers and reformats them into a consistent (XXX) XXX-XXXX pattern. I could work out what it does eventually, but not without staring at it far longer than I’d like.

Copilot handles this well. You can select the cell, click the sparkle icon that appears, and choose “Explain this formula.” It returns a step-by-step breakdown by telling you which part strips the characters, which part captures the digit groups, and how the replacement pattern reassembles them.

This also works when your own formula is returning something wrong. Instead of going through each argument, asking Copilot to explain the logic often surfaces the mistake faster than debugging it yourself.

The side benefit is that it’s taught me functions I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. I’ve started recognizing patterns in LET structures and dynamic arrays just from reading Copilot’s explanations of other people’s work, which is more useful than any tutorial.

Typing formulas is starting to feel optional

But I still read everything Copilot hands back

The interesting shift isn’t that Copilot writes formulas, it’s that the skill is moving from syntax to judgment. Knowing what a formula should return matters more than knowing how to type it. That distinction is only going to sharpen, especially with features like Excel’s Agent Mode already handling multi-step tasks as the COPILOT function gains support for live web data and multi-sheet reasoning.