About Co-Pilot:
Microsoft Co-Pilot is a powerful AI enabled tool that’s available within Excel. When combined with data from Verodat, it’s a fast, efficient tool to speed up data analysis.
Functionality:
Co-Pilot helps users make the most of the clean, reliable data from Verodat by automatically performing key data analysis activities in Excel. It’s very useful to:
Quickly add new formula columns
Automatically build pivot tables
Automatically build charts and visualisations
Help with reformatting data
It speeds up edits to data by advanced users, and automates formula and pivot table creation for novice users.
Key Users:
Novice Excel Users: Suggests analysis options for less advanced Excel users, and automatically applies formulas, pivot tables, and charts based on text requirements from users.
Advanced Excel Users & Data Teams: Instantly builds pivot views, complex formulas, visualisations and applies them across the full dataset, to speed up the build of reports.
Verodat benefits:
Verodat formats data so it’s optimised for use by AI tools like Co-Pilot:
Automatically formats data correctly for analysis so Co-Pilot can accurately generate formulas and pivots
Implements date formats, number formats
Structures in table format numbers
Makes it easy to refresh data so Co-Pilot analysis views can be refreshed and re-utilised, rather than building again
How to use Co-Pilot:
Download up-to-date data feeds using the Verodat Add-In Refresh Data option:
Under ‘Home’ on the top ribbon, click ‘Co-Pilot’
Ask Co-Pilot to manipulate your data as required (suggested actions below)
You can ask Co-Pilot to “Create a PivotTable based on [your chosen data])
One more efficient way to query is to ask Co-Pilot questions about your dataset, and it will often make a Pivot Table to demonstrate results. For example, you can ask, “Which product category has the most unit sales?” or “What is my most popular product?”, and it will create a Pivot Table View + a summary answer.
You can simply read the answer or view the first rows of a Pivot Table within your Co-Pilot chat, but Co-Pilot also has the capabilities to add in Pivot tables in a new tab. You can do this by clicking the button in the chat saying “+ Add to New Sheet”
Re-Format a Column
You can ask Co-Pilot to change the format of data in any column. To do this, just make sure you’re using the same column names that exist in your data.
For example you can ask “Change Order ID column to text format”, or ‘Make Unit Price in Dollars” and the GPT will action the change for all rows.
Add a Formula Column
Co-Pilot makes it incredibly easy to add formula to your data. You can ask it to ‘Apply the Split formula to Customer Name” and it will guide you through this process
You don’t need to know the formula to utilise this feature. A more efficient way to use the tool is to tell it what you want to do, for example ‘Split Customer Names into First and Last Name’ and it will action the required formula.
This type of prompt is also useful to clone a column, or add in a range, for example “Group customer ages into five groups”, and it will suggest an approach that the user can approve.
Create a Visualisation
Co-Pilot accelerates the process of building data visualisations using Excel Charts, or even Python Code. It minimises time spent refining settings and building background Pivots, delivering dashboard views in minutes.
A simple prompt you can apply to any table is ‘Visualise this table of data’, or ‘Create a chart from this table’ and Co-Pilot will respond.
If you want to be more specific, you can ask for specific types of chart or graph e.g. ‘Create a line chat of sum of sales over the past 6 months’.
Co-Pilot will often make helpful recommendations on what chart will be best, so if it has a better suggestion, it might create this as an alternative.
You can simply review the chat within Co-Pilot chat, or click the button in the chat saying “+ Add to New Sheet”
It’s easy to copy and paste multiple visualisations from different tabs into one central sheet to create a complete dashboard view.
Identify Trends
One brilliant feature of Co-Pilot for less advanced users is the analysis function. It enables less confident data users to identify trends they may not have otherwise found.
One easy thing to do is to ask Co-Pilot to ‘identify three key trends from this data’ when selecting a specific table
Alternatively, Co-Pilot also suggests questions based on your data and conversation above the chat box.
Video example: