You’ve seen how Copilot in Excel can help write complex formulas. Today, let’s delve into a dataset containing US birth data from 2000 – 2014 to learn how Copilot in Excel can help us format data, analyze data, and create visualizations. 

1. First, we’d like to ask Copilot to format our data for better readability 

We’d like to go from this: 

Day of Week
Births

6
9083

7
8006

To this:

Day of Week
Births

Saturday
9,083

Sunday
8,006

Prompt: “Convert the days of week into words. For example, 1 is Monday. Additionally, add thousand separators into the birth column.”

2. Next, let’s ask Copilot a question about our data

Prompt: “What are the top 10 days with the lowest birth rate and give a rationale.”

With this prompt, Copilot creates a table with the days with the lowest birth rate, and it gives us an explanation that December 25th is a major US holiday, which means hospitals may have limited staff and schedule fewer elective births. 

3. Finally, we’d like Copilot to help us create a visualization of our data to help us uncover more insights

One of the most powerful ways to understand data is through visualization. Copilot makes it easy to create compelling visuals that can highlight trends and patterns in the birth data.

Prompt: “Create a line graph that graphs the number of births by year. Grouped by the days of the week.”

Here we see that Copilot creates a line graph for us, with each line representing a day of the week. We can see that weekdays have higher birth rates than weekends.

*Disclaimer: If you try these types of prompts and they do not work as expected, it is most likely due to our gradual feature rollout process. Please try again in a few weeks.

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