From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

The future of Excel

- [Instructor] You may have seen or heard about Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise-ready AI that's embedded into Word, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, and Excel. Co-pilot is integrated into Microsoft 365, and automatically inherits all of your company's viable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. And in addition to summarizing email threads in Outlook, creating PowerPoint presentations and Word documents based on previous documents, co-pilot can analyze Excel data. It helps you unlock insights, identify trends, and create professional looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time. And it puts all the rich capabilities of Excel at your fingertips. For example, you can say, "Analyze this quarter's business results and summarize three key trends," and within seconds you've got what you need. Ask additional questions and Copilot responds with charts and data models. Copilot is not a separate application. Instead, it's a system fully-integrated into Excel and other Microsoft 365 apps, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Copilot uses Large Language Models, which are AI systems that can produce natural language text from prompts and data. It's capable of parsing text to translate your words about what you are looking for. It also uses your data in the Microsoft Graph, which connects your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts. These all combined to make up the Copilot system. In short, you can just ask for something while you're working. The question on everyone's mind is, of course, "How do I get this and when can I get this?" Copilot is currently being tested with a limited number of customers, and as of this recording, there's not yet been an official release date. While waiting has always the hard part, it means the Copilot will continue to get better and better before it's released for general use. Let me assure you that when it's live and ready, I'll tell you what you need to do to access it, and how to use it.

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