Bring your organization’s data into Excel with new Copilot synced connectors

Excel is where people turn data into decisions. But the data you need often lives in other systems, like your engineering backlog, ticketing system, or CRM. Getting that data into Excel usually means exporting files, copying and pasting, or working from CSVs that may already be out of date. Getting the data into Excel is only part of the value. Many source systems are built to store and update records, not analyze them. With Copilot in Excel, you can bring connected data into your workbook to understand, model, and act on it. New Copilot connectors are now generally available in Excel, bringing your organization’s connected content - work items, tickets, database rows, CRM records, and docs - straight into the grid, allowing you to put Excel’s full analytical engine to work on it. 

Copilot connectors help remove that extra work. In May, we added previously brought federated Copilot connectors to Excel, which allow users to pull real-time data from providers like LSEG and Moody’s into the grid at query time. Now, synced Copilot connectors index your organization’s own connected content into the Microsoft Graph, allowing Copilot to use that information across Microsoft 365, including right inside Excel. 

 

What synced Copilot connectors bring to Excel 

• Access to 70+ prebuilt connectors. Copilot can ground on data from a variety of tools, including trackers like Jira, databases like Azure SQL, and CRM systems like Salesforce. If your organization uses a system that is not in the connector catalogue, you can also use a custom connector to bring in line-of-business data. 

• Control over the data source. In Excel, you can open the sources menu and choose the connector you want to use, so Copilot draws from exactly the data you intend. 

• A smoother path from records to analysis.  Once the data is available in Excel, you can ask Copilot to help analyze and visualize it— all with natural language prompts. 

• Permission-aware answers. Copilot honors source permissions, so users only see content they are authorized to access. 

 

See it in action: turn a scattered backlog into an accessibility audit 

Meet Emma, an Accessibility Program Manager at Globex running a company-wide WCAG audit. Her accessibility bugs are scattered across Azure DevOps projects owned by a multitude of different product teams. 

 

 

With the Azure DevOps sync connector, work items from all of those projects are indexed into Microsoft 365. That means Emma can bring the information together and analyze them in Excel with a simple prompt in natural language: 

“From our Azure DevOps data, list all open bugs tagged ‘accessibility’ across all projects, with ID, title, project, severity, assignee, and created date, in a table.” 

From there, Emma can keep working in natural language to turn the raw list into a review-ready analysis. She can ask Copilot to add an Age column, apply data bars, sort the oldest bugs to the top, and create a dashboard on a separate sheet. That dashboard can include a PivotTable and PivotChart by project and severity, with a filterable table she can use during team reviews. 

Emma’s team reviews happen weekly. Thankfully, Emma doesn’t have to rebuild everything from scratch for the next review. She can ask Copilot to pull the latest Azure DevOps data, show which bugs closed since last review, and update the dashboard around what is still open. No exports, no project-hopping, and no manual rebuilding!

 

Availability 

Copilot synced connectors are generally available starting today in Excel for Web, Windows, and Mac for commercial customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. MCP servers and agentic solutions are available through a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model, with customers licensing directly from partner services. To connect Excel to your data sources, see the links below. 

 

Learn more 

• Copilot connectors overview 

• Copilot connector catalog 

• Introducing federated Copilot connectors for LSEG and Moody’s in Excel 

• Federated Copilot connectors overview 

• Get started with Copilot in Excel