06 · Your first hour
Sixty minutes with your own data.
A self-study hour, the homework from Friday, and the four lines to bring back to the group.
You are probably sitting with more Excel than you would like, so finding material is not the problem. Finding an hour is. Block one. Pick a workbook you know well enough to recognise a wrong answer, save a copy, and follow the clock below. The point is not to finish; it is to come out the other side with one thing that works and one precise thing that does not.
The plan
One hour, six blocks.
- 0–5 minSet up. Pick one of your own workbooks, something you rebuild or read every month. (The demo files are there if you want a dry run first, but the hour counts double on your own data.) Save a copy of the workbook with today's date. Check Formulas → Calculation Options → Automatic. Open the Copilot pane and set it to Chat only. Set-up checklist →
- 5–15 minUnderstand. Run prompt 01 (explain this workbook) and prompt 03 (data quality). Read the answer against what you already know. Note the first thing it got wrong; that is useful information, not a failure.
- 15–30 minMake one change. Switch to Plan. Pick prompt 07, 09 or 10 and ask for one new column, summary or PivotTable. Read the plan, press Proceed, open the formula it wrote. Change an input and watch the result update, or not.
- 30–40 minVerify. Prompt 18: which rows did you use for this number? Find one number you can check by hand and check it. If it is wrong, say so in the chat and watch how Copilot corrects itself.
- 40–50 minReport or visualize. Prompt 12 or 15: one report sheet or one chart that says one thing. Judge it as a reader would. Would you send it? What would you change first?
- 50–60 minSave the learning. One correction you made more than once goes into Excel Personalization or the .Rules sheet. Then write the four lines below and post them in the CMT convoy channel.
If you have a second hour, do the same thing in Copilot Chat with two or three files that belong together, following Friday's five moves. Compare what each door was good at.
Until next time
The homework we agreed on.
Oskar closed Friday with one commitment each. Either: choose a Copilot frustration, find a workaround or a way to live with it, and report back. Or: test something with Excel through Copilot, the things I showed or simply working with your sheets through the chat, and write down what happened. Have it ready to share at the next convoy. Participation never requires finished homework; a precise failure is as welcome as a win.
Copy the template
I kept correcting: I changed: I checked: I will keep / change / remove it because:
Post it in the CMT convoy channel in Teams. Four lines from each of you is a better knowledge base than anything I could write alone, and it is exactly the kind of material the Copilot Convoy Memory folder is for.
Guardrails
Five things to keep in mind.
Company data stays in the Mycronic tenant.
Copilot Chat, Cowork and Copilot in Excel run inside it. Personal ChatGPT or Claude accounts do not. Use the mock data habit from Friday if you want to try something outside.
Shared files: Plan mode or a copy.
Edits are saved and visible to co-authors. If other people's formulas depend on the sheet, let Copilot plan first, or work on a copy and move the result over.
Confidence is not accuracy.
Copilot speaks confidently from the data it has. Ask for the rows, the formula and the assumptions. One of you watched an AI reference documents it could not possibly have read; the lesson applies here too.
Good enough is not the bar.
A colleague estimated a 10 to 20 percent quality uplift and a 50 percent time saving on his presentation work, and in the same breath said the output is only as good as the input and needs constant questioning. Both halves matter.
One step at a time.
Test a skill or a rule on one task before you imagine the fully automated monthly report. The colleague who built his one-on-one skill got there by adjusting it a little each week, not by designing it perfectly up front.
Where you are
Apprentice, practitioner, superhero.
| Level | You can… | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| Apprentice | Open the pane, switch modes, ask what is in a workbook, check one number. | Make one change in Plan mode and open the formula. |
| Practitioner | Build a summary or PivotTable by prompt, ask for evidence, start a fresh chat with a summary of your instructions, use Copilot Chat across several files. | Save your corrections as Excel Personalization. Add a .Rules sheet to one shared workbook. |
| Superhero | Keep conventions in rules, call @clean-data and @chart-design by name, turn a monthly job into a skill, use Analyst for the heavy questions, and teach a colleague the four-line share-back. | Bring the skill to the next convoy and show it to the group. |
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.
AI + JJ · October 2026. No analytics, sign-in or data collection. The appearance preference is stored only in your browser. External links have their own services and policies.