First of all, the file itself has to be on OneDrive or SharePoint or Google Drive.
So that's very important. If you follow my mouse here, you have to be able to turn the autosave on
and the way you're going to do that is to put the file on OneDrive or Google Drive or SharePoint.
So that's very important. And then notice how I have the Copilot icon on the right side of my
Home toolbar. So you have to have Microsoft 365. I'll pick a number of Copilot on the right side
of the Home ribbon and we'll start to see the Copilot window. Here we have a big list of data.
I'm sure we all have a big list of data and many times we have to summarize that.
Well, I'm going to ask Copilot for that. So we'll come over here to the right.
I'm going to say sum the U.S. dollar amount for each expense type. And you'll notice that
there were U.S. dollar amount and expense type are the column headers of the data.
So you pretty much ask for what you're looking for and many times Copilot can do it. I said sum
the U.S. dollar amount for each expense. Keep an eye on the white space next to our data.
Like I said, sometimes there's going to be, oh, it just filled it in. I was going to say sometimes
there's going to be a few second delay. Now, as it's doing that, you can always go to a different
window and do something else or come back. You don't have to watch it, but that happened pretty
quickly. It just summed up each expense type. Plus, as I said before, if I click on a number
in column I, it has the real formula in there as well, which is useful because then if the data
changes, it'll recalculate. I'll click on done again. Let's say your boss lays this one on you.
Your boss says you have to highlight all the rows to say hotel in red. Well, there's a specific way
to do that in Excel. Maybe you know how to do that. Maybe you don't. Let's ask Copilot. I'm
going to say highlight the rows that say hotel in red. Now, we could have put in other criteria
there, right? Keep an eye on the data on the left, and it just made all the rows that say hotel in
red. Now, that's a feature that's called conditional formatting in Excel, but even if you know how to
do the conditional formatting, to highlight the entire row like that, there's a little bit of a
trick to it. Copilot just did it for us. It can really help you save time in your spreadsheets,
and that's the kind of examples I'm showing you today. I'll click on the word done. In that sheet,
it summarized the data. It highlighted the rows that said hotel. It's very helpful. Here's an
example that I'm sure we've all seen before, and it's one that people really struggle with. I'm
We do have a question. Oh, yes. Aiza says, sometimes you'll get a message that says
editing is not available. What you can do is wait a couple seconds and then try it again,
but if that continues, here's a trick that I learned. Close out of Excel completely,
go back in again, and then it should work better the next time.
So, when that happens for us, everybody, if you get a message that says it's temporarily
unavailable, either try it again after a few seconds or close out of Excel completely,
go back into Excel, open up the Copilot window, and try it again. So, I've had good success with
that. Another thing I'd like to mention is if you're going to use Copilot a lot,
then get a lot of RAM or a lot of memory on that computer. Eight gigabytes isn't going to
be enough anymore. You have to get at least 16, even more than that if you can. The more memory
or the more RAM the computer has, the better Copilot's going to work. That's really true.
Notice how I'm on a sheet that's called Customer List. We have a list of all the customers.
I have the customer ID, the company name, the contact name, and so on. Let's go to a sheet
that's called Order List, and we have a list of all the orders. Here we have the order ID,
the customer ID, the employee ID, and so on. Notice how we have the customer ID without the
customer name. So, let's say your boss says, can you fill in the customer names for each one of
those? Well, if you had to look up that information on a different sheet, it would really take a long
time. Now, there's an Excel formula for that, maybe VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, but a lot of people
struggle with that formula. Let's see if Copilot can help us. So, we're going to come over here to
Copilot. By the way, look at what Copilot gives you. It really describes what it's actually doing
to your spreadsheet. So, you can use it as a learning tool as well if you read all that
information. So, I'm going to say, get the company name from the Customer List sheet
and put it with each row on this sheet. Get the company name from the Customer List sheet
and put it with each row on this sheet. So, the real task this time is trying to look up
information on a different sheet, which happens a lot in Excel. Now, before I press the enter key,
I want to show you that the last column of data that I have is column O. You can see that. Now,
I'm going to send it. Let's see what's going to happen. You can see it's doing its thing
and it says it's done. I'm going to scroll to the right. Notice now we have column P,
which has the company name. If I would like that to be next to the customer ID,
I'll just cut it. I'm going to right click on column P and cut it. We'll go back to column C.
I'm going to right click on column C and I'll say insert the cut cells. Now, the company name
is next to the customer ID, but you can see how column C needs to be made wider. We'll just ask
Copilot for that again. I'll say make column C wider. Now, I imagine that most of you know how
to do that, but maybe you don't. We're just going to ask Copilot to make column C wider.
Keep an eye on column C. It just did it. If you prompt Copilot properly, you can really get some
great results. That was significant. We were able to look up the information from the other sheet
and then it put the proper formula in column C as well. I bet that one's something we can all
relate to. We will have time for questions at the end, everybody. If you have any questions
right now, you can put them in the chat area of the webinar platform, but we'll have time
for questions at the end. I'm going to go ahead. Let's go over a couple sheets.
I'll go over to a sheet that's called VLOOKUP true. Here's going to be another lookup.
Sometimes the information is on the same sheet. Well, I would like to get the letter grade for
the number of scores. We'll come over here to Copilot. Get the letter grade for each score.
Pretty much put what you want in English, and then you can see a lot of times it'll give us
the right result. You'll get better at prompting as you use it more and more. Look at column C.
It just filled them in. 36 would have given us an F because everything between zero and 39
will give us an F according to that table. Then if you look at column C,
it put the real formulas in there as well. You don't even have to know what that formula means.
We're just looking for the results here, but it is describing what it did over here on the right
if you wind up running about that VLOOKUP.
