It's that time of the month again: the time when Microsoft publishes a change log of all the features that it added to Excel in the past four weeks. Last month, the popular spreadsheet software saw improvements to textual analysis, Focus Cell, and new functions, among a few other things. The second month of the year is all about Copilot.

Microsoft really wants you to use Copilot

Starting with Windows, Copilot in Excel with Python is now available worldwide in multiple languages. As the name suggests, this is a tool that Excel customers can utilize to manipulate data and gain insights into it through the Python programming language, without needing to be proficient in Excel or Python, thanks to Copilot.

Next, we have an improvement that is available to both Windows and web customers leveraging Excel. There is now a faster way to reach Copilot: if you make a cell selection, you'll see the Ask Copilot button in the context menu. This will show you a series of suggestions for your selection, and once you click on any of them, Copilot will run the prompt automatically on the dedicated Copilot sidepane, removing the need for manually typing a query.

Finally, there is one more capability that is being made available to Windows and Mac users. This involves using Power Query supercharged with Copilot to import and reference data from various external sources. This is something we already covered in detail last week, but it is pertinent to note that it is only available to Beta Channel Insiders for now, with no word on general availability yet.

All in all, it's an interesting month for those who leverage Copilot in Excel, but it's not terribly exciting for those who would rather use the "classic" ways to use Excel to manipulate their data.