Overview
Excel is powerful on its own pair it with Microsoft Copilot and it becomes a genuine time-saver.
This practical session shows you how to use Copilot inside Excel to automate the analysis, formulas, and formatting tasks that normally take hours. You'll see real spreadsheets transformed with plain-English requests: building complex formulas, spotting trends, cleaning messy data, and generating instant summaries and charts.
Designed for professionals who already use Excel and want to work smarter, this session skips the fluff and focuses on techniques you can apply to your own workbooks immediately. Some prior Excel experience is helpful.
Areas Covered in the Session
- What Copilot can and can't do inside Excel
- Getting set up: licensing, versions, and where Copilot appears
- Asking Copilot to build formulas from plain-English descriptions
- Explaining and troubleshooting existing formulas you didn't write
- Automating data cleanup: fixing text, dates, duplicates, and blanks
- Generating pivot-table-style summaries with a single request
- Spotting trends, outliers, and insights in your data
- Creating and formatting charts automatically
- Applying conditional formatting through Copilot
- Adding calculated columns and helper formulas on request
- Summarizing large datasets into plain-English takeaways
- Building complex logic with IF, XLOOKUP, and nested functions
- Turning raw data into a formatted, presentation-ready report
- Combining Copilot with Excel tables for repeatable automation
- Prompting tips for getting accurate spreadsheet results
- Verifying Copilot's output and catching mistakes
- Real-world automation examples for finance, HR, and operations
- Building a faster monthly reporting workflow
Who Will Benefit
- Business Owners
- CEO's / CFO's / CTO's
- Managers of All Levels
- Anybody who uses Excel, PowerPoint, Word, or Outlook on a regular basis, and wants to be more efficient and productive
- Administrators
- Salespeople
- Trainers
- Bankers
- Self Employed
- HR
- Project Managers
- Office Workers
Speaker Profile
Tom Fragale is a computer professional with over 40 years of professional experience. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and a Microsoft Certified Expert in Excel. He has trained over 45,000 businesspeople in on-line webinars, public seminars, and on-site training sessions. His clients include many Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, military bases, and companies large and small across many industries, including manufacturing, banking, pharmaceutical, education, retail, etc. He started his career as a database application programmer and has served as a consultant and a trainer on many successful projects. His topics of expertise include: Access, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Crystal Reports, SQL Server, Visio, ChatGPT, PowerBi, and CoPilot, among others. His passion is training people and helping people get the most out of their computers, and he is a published author having written a book on Microsoft Access and another book on Excel Pivot Tables. He graduated in 1988 from LaSalle University in Philadelphia, PA with a BA in Computer Science.