Microsoft Office Apps Get More Useful Features Copilot AI

Microsoft is revealing novel features in its $30-per-user monthly Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions that aim to improve AI integration in Office apps. Excel is gaining Python integration in Copilot, PowerPoint has an improved AI-powered story creator, Word is getting better at AI-assisted drafting, and Copilot will also be able to support you organize your Outlook inbox.

After introducing Python to Excel last year, Microsoft is now combining Python support with Copilot to enable Excel users to easily perform advanced analysis on spreadsheet data. “Now anyone can work with Copilot to perform advanced analytics like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data—all using natural language, without coding,” says Jared Spataro, vice president of AI at Microsoft. “It’s like adding a skilled data scientist to your team.”

Copilot and Python integration in Excel enters public preview today, just as Microsoft is rolling out Copilot in Excel to its Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers. Microsoft has also added Copilot support for XLOOKUP and SUMIF, conditional formatting, and the ability for the AI ​​assistant to create more charts and pivot tables.

Copilot in PowerPoint is also getting a boost, with an improved story creation tool that’s supposed to support you quickly create your first slide draft. The AI ​​assistant will soon even employ a company template to create drafts or company-approved images from SharePoint libraries.

Copilot in Microsoft Teams will summarize conversations that happened in text chats as well as spoken ones in meetings later this month. This will support meeting organizers make sure they haven’t missed any unanswered questions typed in chat. “Our customers tell us that Copilot in Teams has changed meetings forever—in fact, it’s the number one place they see value,” Spataro says.

Personally, I’ve been waiting for improvements to Copilot in Outlook that go beyond drafting and summarizing, and now Microsoft is starting to let its AI assistant support organize your inbox. A novel “prioritize my inbox” feature lets Copilot automatically prioritize your emails. Later this year, you’ll also be able to “teach Copilot specific topics, keywords, or people that are important to you,” according to Spataro. Those emails will also be marked as priority in your inbox.

Later this month, Microsoft is also improving Copilot in Word to let you reference data from emails and meetings, as well as data from documents. This will make it easier to include attachments from emails or entire talking points from meetings. Later this month, Microsoft is also introducing Copilot in OneDrive, which makes it easier to summarize and compare up to five files to spot the differences between them.

Microsoft’s improvements to Copilot in Office aim to make the AI ​​assistant more appealing to businesses, along with the introduction of a novel Copilot Pages feature and AI agents that will automate some tasks. Latest Reports suggested that Microsoft’s paid enterprise version of Copilot had been met with a lukewarm reception due to bugs and a reluctance to pay the $30-per-user price tag.

Microsoft says 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies now employ Copilot, and the number of people using Copilot daily at work “nearly doubled quarter over quarter.” Both of those numbers appear to include the free version of Copilot. Microsoft has landed a substantial customer for Microsoft 365 Copilot: Vodafone is signing up for 68,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for its 100,000 employees after testing the AI ​​assistant and seeing early benefits.