--- title: "Copilot in Excel: two-doors" client: "Mycronic CMT Copilot Convoy" language: en date: "2026-10-17" session_date: "2026-10-16" version: "1.3.0" canonical_url: "https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/two-doors.html" --- 01 · Two doors into Excel # Talk to your files, or work inside them. Copilot Chat and Copilot in Excel are two different colleagues. On Friday I used both, in that order. The first door is Copilot Chat, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app you already use for mail and meetings. It can read your Excel files without opening them, several at once, and it can make things Excel cannot, such as an infographic. The second door is the Copilot pane inside Excel. It sits next to your grid and can actually change the workbook: formulas, tables, charts, new sheets. Most of the frustration I hear comes from using the wrong door. Asking Chat to rebuild a sheet, or asking the Excel pane to compare three files it cannot see. Here is how I think about it, and the exact moves from the demo. When to use which ## Two colleagues, two jobs. A working rule of thumb. Both doors are improving monthly; the division of labour is what matters. | You want to… | Door 1 · Copilot Chat | Door 2 · Copilot in Excel | | --- | --- | --- | | Understand what is in a file, fast | Yes. Reference the file with a slash and ask. | Yes, in Chat only mode. | | Compare or combine several workbooks | Yes. Add two, three, five files to the same chat. | Partly. It can import data from other workbooks saved on OneDrive or SharePoint, but you work one workbook at a time. | | Change the workbook: formulas, tables, charts, sheets | No. It gives you text and tables in chat. | Yes, this is the whole point of Allow editing and Plan. | | Make a visual that is not an Excel chart | Yes. Ask for an infographic or an image. | No. Charts, PivotTables and shapes only. | | Reuse the same analysis on next month's file | Save the prompt; keep the chat in your history. | Save a skill, or put the conventions in a .Rules sheet. | | Keep company conventions attached to the file | No. | Yes, with a visible .Rules worksheet. | | Deep statistics across many files, with the code visible | Use the Analyst agent, see "Over the hill" below. | Ask Copilot to use Python in Allow editing mode, where available. | Door 1 ## Copilot Chat: the moves from Friday. Open the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Make sure **Work IQ** is on in the top-left corner; that is what lets Copilot see your files. Then follow the five steps I did on Friday. I used three mock aftermarket files; you should use your own. Two or three workbooks that belong together, from your own work, where you know what a sensible answer looks like. If you would rather rehearse on neutral data first, [download my three demo files](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/index.html#downloads), save them to your OneDrive and run the same five steps. Then do it again with your own. ![Copilot Chat home: Work IQ button and model picker top left, the Message Copilot box in the middle, temporary chat and settings icons top right.](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/assets/shots/chat-home.webp) Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Work IQ top left, the prompt box in the middle. Screenshot from my own account, 17 October 2026. - #### Get your files into the chat. Three ways. **The slash.** In the prompt box, type **/** and start typing part of the file name. A picker opens with tabs for People, Files, Meetings, Emails and more. Pick the file, repeat for the next one. On Friday one of you asked whether the zeros in my file names were a command. They were not, just my file names; the slash is the command. ![The slash picker in Copilot Chat after typing /0000, showing tabs for All, People, Files and more, and a result row for the 0000 Claims workbook.](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/assets/shots/chat-slash-picker.webp) Typing **/0000** finds my mock "0000 Claims" workbook. Other results and a tooltip are blurred because they are my own mail. **The plus sign.** Click **+** at the left end of the prompt box and browse: upload from your computer, attach cloud files from OneDrive, SharePoint or a Teams meeting, or add other work content. Same result, more clicking, no need to remember a file name. **Or just ask.** Copilot can find the files itself. This is what I typed the morning after the session: Let Copilot find the files ```text Find the three Excel files that begin with 0000 and let me know what I can learn from them. ``` ![Copilot Chat on the Mac: the prompt Find the three Excel files that begin with 0000 and let me know what I can learn from them, followed by Reasoning completed in 6 steps, a Files card listing 0000 Claims, 0000 Support_Cases and 0000 Full_warranty_and_goodwill, and the beginning of a section called What each file tells you.](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/assets/shots/chat-just-ask.webp) No slash, no picker. Copilot found all three mock files, listed them with their dates, and started explaining what each one tells me. Screenshot from my own account, 17 October 2026. And if you do not know exactly which files you need, say so. "Find whatever we have on warranty claims for the last two quarters" is a perfectly good opening. Let Copilot figure out the files; you judge whether it found the right ones. - #### Ask a lazy question. Friday's opening prompt ```text What are examples of insights that I could get from these three files? ``` That is more or less what I typed. Copilot read the files and suggested where to dig. You do not need to design the perfect prompt before you know what the data can tell you. - #### Follow the suggestion, stay in the same chat. Second move ```text List the most common failure modes, and show how they trend by product family. ``` I did not have to point at the files again. As long as you stay in the same conversation, everything you added is still there. Copilot answered with a table and offered the next step. - #### Check one number you already know. My table said 145 claims for a product family. I knew that number, so I knew Copilot had read the right data. Always find one such anchor before you trust the rest. If you do not know a number, ask Copilot which rows it used and open them. - #### Make something Excel cannot. Third move, deliberately rough ```text Great. Create an infographic that clearly lays out these failure modes and gives me a visual representation of the analysis you just did. ``` I called it a horrible prompt on Friday and it still worked. The result is a starting point for your own thinking, not a customer-ready graphic. Save the better ones; they expand how you think about your data. Which brings me to the microphone in the prompt box. Try talking to Copilot instead of typing. You will feel like you are rambling, and that is fine. Every sentence, every half-finished thought gives Copilot more context to work with, and the result is usually better than the three tidy words you would have typed. More importantly, you start to figure out not just how to operate this thing but how to work with it, the way you learn to work with a new colleague. This is how coexistence begins. Three ways to break free from your history Copilot Chat remembers your chats and learns from your work. Usually that is what you want. When it is not: turn **Work IQ** off for a question that should not use company data; start a **temporary chat** from the icon in the top-right corner, which ignores your history and custom instructions but still runs inside the Mycronic tenant; or simply begin your prompt with "Disregard previous conversations and everything you know about me". The full personalization settings are on the [next page](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/personalize.html#chat). ![The Work IQ button and the Auto model picker in Copilot Chat.](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/assets/shots/chat-workiq.webp) ![The Start a temporary chat icon with its tooltip in Copilot Chat.](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/assets/shots/chat-temporary.webp) Left: Work IQ on, model set to Auto. Right: the temporary chat icon. Both live in the top bar of Copilot Chat. Door 2 ## Copilot in Excel: the colleague who can touch the grid. Open any workbook and look at the lower-right corner of the Excel window. That round Copilot button opens a pane next to your sheet. The same prompts work here, but now Copilot can act: add a column with a formula, build a PivotTable, create a chart, make a new sheet, apply conditional formatting. In **Allow editing** mode it does so directly; in **Plan** mode it shows the steps first and waits for you; in **Chat only** mode it answers without touching anything. If you want to be safe while you learn, start in Chat only. Once you trust it with a workbook, Allow editing is where the real time saving is. Everything it changes can be undone, and the file keeps its version history. ![The Copilot pane in Excel: menu icon, Auto model picker, settings and close at the top; Let's edit your workbook with three suggestion chips; Allow editing selector and the Edit with Copilot prompt box at the bottom.](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/assets/shots/excel-pane-overview.webp) The Copilot pane in Excel for the web, opened on my mock claims workbook. Top row: previous chats, model picker, settings. Bottom: the mode selector and the prompt box. The set-up details (licence, the one calculation setting that blocks editing, AutoSave, undo) are on [Set it up](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/setup.html). Every control in this pane is described on [Every button, explained](https://copilotinexcel.jardenberg.net/buttons.html). Over the hill ## Four more doors, on the other side of the learning curve. Think of this as a hill. On this side, where most of us are, the groundwork is Copilot Chat with a few files and the Copilot pane in a workbook, used in fairly simple ways. The climb is real: new vocabulary, settings in three places, a tool that changes monthly. The four doors below are on the other side of that hill. You do not need them this week, but you will hear about them, so here is the map, checked against Microsoft's documentation on 17 October 2026. Availability in the Mycronic tenant depends on licences and admin settings. - #### Analyst, the data agent in Copilot Chat. Under **Agents** in the left navigation. It is built for exactly the thing I did on Friday, but deeper: attach several files, ask a question, and it runs Python step by step, shows the code it is running and returns a report with charts. When a question needs real statistics across files, start here rather than in plain chat. - #### Cowork, the colleague who does tasks. The Cowork tab next to Chat. It can create and edit Excel files in OneDrive or SharePoint, run on a schedule, and ask you before anything sensitive. My advice from Friday stands: for your own work, stay in Chat or Cowork. Keep agents for the things you want to distribute to others, and expect them to be messy for a while. - #### Excel Agent, the workbook maker. Also in Copilot Chat, for creating a new workbook from a description and your sources. It needs a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence and the Anthropic models enabled by your admin. The result opens read-only in chat; detailed edits happen in Excel. - #### Python inside the Excel pane. Since spring, Copilot in Excel can use Python while it edits, for heavier transformations and visuals. Ask for it explicitly: "use Python for this analysis". If nothing happens, your tenant or client build does not have it yet. Two things that are gone, so you do not go looking: the **COPILOT()** worksheet function was retired on 14 September 2026 (old cells show a cached value and recalculate to #NAME?), and the old "App Skills" advanced-analysis mode was removed in February 2026. Everything they did now lives in the pane, in Analyst, or in Cowork. Around the corner ## What I meant to show you in the last four minutes. The plan for Friday had a short segment after Excel: the same reporting question, answered in Claude instead. We never got there, so here is the argument in words. Everything in this section is about where the tools are heading, not what you should use for Mycronic work today; your approved tools are the ones on the rest of this site. Here is what I find interesting. When I give a reporting job to Claude, I do not work *in* Excel with an assistant bolted on. I describe the job, hand over the files, and the work happens in a space built for that conversation. There is not a single menu item that is irrelevant to me. No ribbon, no forty functions I will never use, nothing to hunt for. The tool is tailored to exactly what I am doing and what I want next, and when I need a spreadsheet at the end, I get one. The other half is what comes out. Instead of a chart on a sheet, I can ask for a dashboard I can click through, an explainer that walks a reader through the numbers, even a short film that tells the story of the quarter. Interactive, creative ways to show data that go well beyond what Excel can do today, and, I would argue, beyond Power BI. The report stops being a file you send and becomes something the receiver can explore. Why does this matter to you, inside a Microsoft environment? Because, as I read it, this is where the features come from. Cowork, which several of you have already used, showed up in Microsoft 365 not long after Claude introduced the idea. Skills defined in a SKILL.md file, the model picker with Claude in it, the Excel Agent running on Anthropic models: the pattern is hard to miss. Keeping half an eye on what Claude can do is a decent forecast of what your Copilot will do in a few months. So that is around the corner: less working inside the spreadsheet, more describing the outcome you want; and reports that people can explore rather than open. When we have a few minutes in a coming convoy, I will show the same claims data answered this way. Until then, the two doors on this page are plenty. Prepared by AI + JJ. Post-session self-study material after Convoy #4 (16 October 2026), checked against Microsoft documentation on 17 October 2026. Prompts and rules are proposed wording to adapt.