MICROSOFT has announced an expansion to Excel Copilot with an interactive canvas that lets users generate visual reports from workbook data using natural language prompts. The canvas remains tightly connected to the source workbook, so reports automatically refresh as underlying data changes. At present, this feature is available to Microsoft 365 Insider participants in a beta release.
The article details several capabilities and rollout plans. In conversational report generation, the interactive canvas can produce executive briefs, project updates, or status reports, with users able to refine layouts and present styles through ongoing dialogue without starting from scratch.
Microsoft also introduced productivity enhancements for Excel Copilot, including a skill-building function to create reusable workflows and a skill-recording feature that translates demonstrated actions into reproducible skills. For data handling, the Get Data function allows users to describe desired sources and formats verbally, reducing manual Power Query steps, while the Clean Data utility identifies duplicates and formatting issues and suggests fixes.
The rollout is staged: the skill-building feature began a global rollout in October, skill-recording to preview users by late October, Get Data via the web version of Excel in mid-October, and the Clean Data tool deploying in measured phases. The article attributes these developments to Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to streamline data import, cleaning and presentation within Copilot-enabled Excel.