Copilot in Excel: Bringing clarity to collaborative workbooks

Spreadsheets rarely stay still. Numbers get updated, formulas change, teammates make edits, and Copilot helps move work forward. But when you come back to a workbook, one question can be surprisingly hard to answer: What changed?

Until now, finding out often meant comparing versions or digging through a long list of edits. With Copilot in Excel, there’s now a simpler way: just ask.

The change history skill is now generally available in Copilot in Excel. It combines Excel's understanding of workbook history with Copilot's reasoning capabilities to enable users to understand and review changes. If something needs to be fixed, like a broken formula, Copilot can help repair it.

Let’s take a look at what this might look like for you.

Get caught up more efficiently

• Scenario: You're returning to a sales forecast workbook after a few days away.
• Prompt: Summarize the important changes from the past week. Focus on formula or reference edits, structural changes, and changes affecting broad ranges or many cells.
• Outcome: Copilot surfaces relevant changes, who made them, and where they occurred so you can quickly understand what changed.

Visualize changes in context

• Scenario: You want to review updates made by a specific teammate.
• Prompt: Highlight Sally’s changes in yellow and all Copilot-assisted changes in green.
• Outcome: Copilot visually highlights the requested cell changes directly in the workbook, making them easy to review in context.

Undo only the changes you don’t want

• Scenario: A workbook was updated by several people, but you only want to reverse specific AI-assisted edits.
• Prompt: Undo Mark’s Copilot-assisted changes from the past week, but keep his manual edits.
• Outcome: Copilot identifies the changes described and helps restore only the edits you want to reverse.

Investigate a broken formula

• Scenario: A formula that worked last week isn’t working anymore.
• Prompt: What changed that caused this formula to break?
• Outcome: Copilot traces the cell changes that may have led to the issue, explains what happened, and helps restore the formula to the last working version.

Whether you’re collaborating across teams, reviewing AI-assisted edits, or troubleshooting a model, we can’t wait to see what you build with Copilot in Excel. Learn more here.