Excel Copilot: Skip PivotTables & Analyze Data with Natural Language

For decades, Excel’s PivotTables have been the proceed-to for data analysis and I’ve certainly put in the time mastering their intricacies. They function, but the setup always felt disproportionate to the questions I was trying to answer. Now, there’s a different approach: natural language queries through Copilot. Instead of building a table, you simply type your question in plain English, and Copilot delivers an answer.

It’s not a hidden function or a complex formula; it’s a conversation with your data. For most routine analysis tasks, this is how I now prefer to work with Excel, and PivotTables have become a tool I reach for far less frequently.

Copilot Lets You Ask Questions Instead of Building Tables

A Plain English Prompt Replaces Most of the Clicking

The traditional PivotTable workflow for a sales spreadsheet typically involves selecting the data range, clicking Insert, choosing PivotTable, deciding where to place it, then dragging fields like Region into Rows, Product Category into Columns, and Sales Amount into Values. If you need averages instead of sums, you have to right-click and adjust the aggregation. That’s a significant amount of clicking for a single question.

With Copilot, the process is streamlined. I can simply type:

Which region had the highest total sales?

That’s it. Copilot analyzes the table – in my case, 32 rows of sales data spanning North, South, East, and West across four product categories – and provides the answer directly.

The real advantage emerges when you need follow-up answers. With a PivotTable, a different question often requires reconfiguring the layout or creating a fresh one. In Copilot, I can simply type the next prompt. After identifying the top-performing region, I asked:

Present me a breakdown of sales by product category for the North region.

Copilot responded with a concise summary table listing Electronics, Clothing, Home & Garden, and Sports, each with its respective total.

I tested this with individual performance as well. Typing “Which salesperson had the highest total sales amount?” gave me a ranked list of all eight salespeople in the spreadsheet, with David Chen and Emma Davis tied at the top and Sarah Johnson at the bottom. This type of query would normally require grouping by Salesperson in a PivotTable and manually sorting the results.

This conversational flow is particularly practical because you aren’t forced to pre-plan your analysis or decide which fields to include. You simply ask what you seek to realize, one question at a time. And if a prompt doesn’t initially return the desired result, refining it takes only seconds.

It Handles Charting and Summarization in One Step

You Don’t Need to Build a Chart Separately After Analyzing Data

Creating a chart in Excel traditionally requires selecting the data range, picking a chart type from the ribbon, and then adjusting axis labels, titles, and colors to ensure the chart effectively communicates the intended message. If you’ve already built a PivotTable, you’d then create a PivotChart on top of it – adding another layer of setup for what should be a straightforward visual.

Copilot consolidates this process into a single prompt. I typed the following, and it generated a bar chart comparing total Sales Amount by Product Category:

Create a bar chart comparing the total Sales Amount by Product Category.

The labels were already in place, and there was no need to select ranges or navigate the Charts section under Insert. You can also be more specific. Using the following prompt, Copilot pulled commission data for all eight people in my spreadsheet and plotted it without me specifying the relevant cells. Copilot inferred the necessary columns on its own.

Create a bar chart showing total commissions earned by each salesperson.

This is where the time savings really add up. Creating a single chart isn’t a huge time saver, but if you’re compiling a quick report and need three or four visuals representing different angles of the same dataset, the traditional method becomes significantly more time-consuming. With Copilot, each chart is just another prompt. Microsoft is also actively evolving how Copilot works in Excel, with Agent Mode offering deeper analysis options beyond basic chat prompts.

Copilot Isn’t Perfect, and PivotTables Still Have a Place

Know When to Type a Prompt and When to Drag a Field

As Microsoft support documentation notes, Copilot features are being deprecated, with App Skills being removed from Excel by late February 2026. Users can transition to Agent Mode for pivot table creation and editing, Copilot Chat for basic questions, or Analyst for more in-depth data analysis. Copilot requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and it can sometimes struggle with data containing merged cells, empty rows, or inconsistent headers. For live dashboards with slicers or calculated fields that you’ll revisit weekly, PivotTables remain the better choice. But for quick questions – such as what sold best last quarter, who earned the most commission, and how the East compares to the West – typing a sentence is more efficient than configuring a table every time. I recommend trying both approaches with the same dataset to see which one you prefer.

The shift towards conversational data analysis in Excel represents a significant change in how we interact with spreadsheets. While PivotTables aren’t going away, Copilot offers a more intuitive and efficient way to extract insights from data for many common tasks. The future of Excel seems to be less about building complex tables and more about simply asking the questions you need answered.