Mycronic CMT Copilot Convoy · After Convoy #4 · 16 October 2026
Copilot in Excel.
The rest of what I wanted to show you.
Imagine an Excel superstar on the other end of your keyboard. This is how you talk to them.
On Friday I ran out of time. I had just shown you how to pull three Excel files into Copilot Chat, ask for insights, follow the suggestions, check a number and turn a table into an infographic. Then we opened Copilot inside Excel, found the mode selector, the personalization setting and the workbook rules, and we were out of time.
So here is the post-session material I promised: everything from the demo, written down with screenshots from my own account, plus the parts I never got to. Settings, every button in the pane, how to teach Copilot the way you work, workbook rules you can paste in today, and a set of prompts that take you from "what is in this file" to a report you can defend.
You do not need to read it all. Pick the door that matches your Monday morning.
Choose your door
Where do you want to start?
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Show me the demo again, slowly.
Copilot Chat with your Excel files on one side, Copilot inside Excel on the other. When to use which, the exact moves from Friday, and what is around the corner.
Help me find the buttons.
Where Copilot lives in Excel, the three modes, the model picker, chat history, undo, and the one setting that quietly stops editing from working.
Teach it how I work.
Three layers of memory: your personal preferences, rules that travel with the workbook, and skills you can call with an @. With copyable text for each.
Every button, explained.
A field guide to the Copilot pane. What each control does, where it is, and what Microsoft calls it.
Give me prompts that work.
Twenty-four prompts in a ladder: understand, clean, calculate, report, visualize, verify, repeat. Copy, paste, change the column names.
I have one hour. Make it count.
A self-study hour with your own data, the homework we agreed on Friday, and the four lines to share back in the CMT convoy channel.
What happened on Friday
The one-minute version.
Oskar opened with three frustrations most of us recognise: Copilot cannot find something you know exists, it keeps misunderstanding your instructions, and it answers with a confidence the data does not always deserve. His three workarounds: narrow the context by adding the actual files, pull the plug on a long chat and start fresh with a summary of your instructions, and ask Copilot to separate its strong assumptions from what the data actually says.
Then I took the Excel block. In Copilot Chat I typed a slash, picked three mock aftermarket files (support cases, claims, warranty and goodwill), and asked a deliberately lazy question: what insights could I get from these? Copilot answered and suggested the next step. I followed it, got a table of claims by product family, and checked one number I already knew. Then I asked for an infographic. Not something you would put on LinkedIn, but a starting point you could never have produced inside Excel alone.
Inside Excel we found the Copilot button in the lower-right corner, the mode selector (Allow editing, Plan, Chat only), previous chats, the personalization setting that only applies to Excel, and the .Rules sheet that Copilot creates for workbook rules. That is where the clock ran out. The rules I promised are on the Teach it how you work page.
Homework we agreed on
Pick one Copilot frustration and find a workaround, or test something with Excel through Copilot. Write down what happened and bring it to the next convoy. The first-hour page turns that into a plan.
Before you start
Three things I keep repeating.
Use your own data. Your own sheets, your own work.
This is the one that matters most. The fastest way to learn Copilot is on a workbook you already understand, where you can tell a right answer from a wrong one and where a good result saves you time on Monday. Your claims list, your forecast, your headcount sheet, the report you rebuild every month. My mock files were useful for a demo; your files are useful for your job. Keep sensitive data inside the Mycronic tenant and out of personal tools, and work on a copy while you learn.
If you want a neutral sandbox for the first ten minutes, my three demo files are below. Then switch to your own.
Be lazy first, precise second.
You do not need a good prompt to begin. "What can I learn from this?" is enough to start a conversation. Then add the column names, the period and the comparison you actually want. Copilot gets better as you get specific.
Treat it like a new colleague: ask for evidence.
One of you got an extra sheet back from Copilot last week listing the evidence gaps it had found, because the instructions asked for truth before assumptions. That is the right instinct. Ask for the source rows, the formula, the assumption. Check one number you already know. A colleague you never question starts cutting corners; so does this one.
Sandbox
The three demo files, if you want them.
These are the "0000" workbooks from Friday: 145 synthetic warranty claims, 280 support cases and 481 warranty-and-goodwill time entries for a company that does not exist. They are good for rehearsing the moves and for checking that your Copilot behaves like mine. They are not a substitute for your own data, so use them for an hour at most, then open something real.
- 0000 demo workbooks · ZIP, three Excel files and a READMESave the three files to your OneDrive so Copilot Chat can find them with a slash, or just ask it to find the files that begin with 0000. Invented data; the customer names are placeholders. Free to use for your own learning.
Keep the loop going
Tell me what you tried.
Use the CMT convoy channel in Teams for questions, screenshots and small wins, so that everybody learns from your attempt. If you want a one-on-one on your own files, book a slot and bring the workbook.
Read with your AI · Markdown →
About this companion and its sources
Post-session material after Convoy #4 of the Mycronic CMT Copilot Convoy, 16 October 2026. The pages follow my Excel demonstration and the Copilot Goodie Bag prepared before the session, and expand them into self-study material. Quotations from the session come from the recording's transcript; colleagues are kept anonymous and the internal discussion is not published here.
Product descriptions are checked against Microsoft's documentation on 17 October 2026 and linked on the Sources page. Screenshots are from my own Microsoft 365 account, taken on the mock aftermarket workbook from the demo, with private items blurred. Prompts and rule sets are proposed wording to adapt, not validated Mycronic defaults. Availability of features depends on licence, rollout and admin settings.
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