How to Use Copilot in Excel in 2026 (Plans, Steps, Prompts)

Short answer: select the Copilot icon in the lower-right corner of Excel, pick edit, plan or chat mode, and describe what you want in plain English. You need a paid plan that includes it: Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/mo), Family ($12.99/mo) or Premium ($19.99/mo) at home, or a business plan at work. The in-cell COPILOT function was retired on September 14, 2026. Verified on microsoft.com, October 2026.

That last point changes most of the older tutorials you will find. In 2025 the headline trick was typing =COPILOT() into a cell. That formula is gone, and the side pane has grown into an assistant that edits the workbook for you, with a plan mode that shows its steps before it touches anything. My take: edit mode is the reason to pay, and plan mode is the reason to trust it on a file that matters.

Which plan includes Copilot in Excel?

Every plan below includes Copilot in Excel in some form. The difference is how much you can use it and who on the account gets it.

US prices read on Microsoft's own pages on October 28, 2026.

Dupple data: on Microsoft's plan pages as of October 28, 2026, the cheapest way to get Copilot in Excel is Personal at $99.99 a year. Paying monthly instead costs $119.88 over twelve months (our arithmetic), so the yearly plan saves $19.89, the same figure Microsoft prints. At work, the enterprise add-on comes to $360 per user per year (12 x $30, our arithmetic), on top of the Microsoft 365 plan it attaches to.

Two notes on the business rows. The $18 Copilot Business price is a discount Microsoft runs from July 1 to December 31, 2026, and it applies to the first year only, so budget for the $21 list price at renewal ($252 a year per seat, our arithmetic). And a business account without any add-on is not locked out: Microsoft's FAQ lists a Copilot Chat-eligible business or enterprise subscription as enough for standard access, labeled "M365 Copilot (Basic)" in the app.

The Microsoft 365 Basic plan and a free Microsoft account do not include Copilot in Excel. If you only want the free Copilot chat app, read whether Microsoft Copilot is free instead.

How to use Copilot in Excel, step by step

These steps follow Microsoft's Get started with Copilot in Excel guide and its Copilot in Excel FAQ.

1. Confirm your license. Open your Microsoft account and go to Services & subscriptions. On a home plan you must be the subscription owner; on a work account, ask IT which Copilot license you have.
2. Save the workbook to OneDrive. Microsoft's plan page says Copilot in Excel on home plans requires AutoSave, which means a file saved to OneDrive. Microsoft's tips page says Copilot runs with AutoSave on or off, so its pages differ; saving to OneDrive first avoids the question.
3. Set calculation to Automatic. Copilot can only edit a workbook when Excel's Calculation Options are set to Automatic. Manual calculation, common in large financial models, blocks editing.
4. Open the pane. Select the Copilot icon in the lower-right corner of Excel.
5. Pick a mode. Copilot opens in edit mode by default. Switch to plan mode for anything you would hate to undo, or chat mode when you only want answers.
6. Pick a model, or leave it on Auto. Premium and commercial Copilot subscribers get a model picker in the upper-left of the pane. Microsoft's FAQ says it offers Claude models from Anthropic and GPT models from OpenAI; the choice resets when you close Excel.
7. Write the prompt with names. Name the sheet, the columns and the range. "Add a column with each order's margin in Sales!F2:F500" gets a better result than "add margins".
8. Watch, stop, review. Copilot shows its reasoning in the pane and makes changes live. Select Stop to halt it, then check every formula it wrote. Undo or version history rolls back anything you do not want.

Edit, plan or chat: which mode to use

The mode decides whether Copilot is allowed to touch your file. Pick it before you type, not after.

Source: Microsoft, Get started with Copilot in Excel, October 2026.

The catch with edit mode is visibility. Once you save Copilot's changes, anyone with access to the file sees them, including people coauthoring at that moment. On a shared budget, run plan mode first, read the plan, then confirm.

Not every device gets every mode. Excel on Windows, Mac and the web support all three. On iPad you get chat and plan, with edit mode rolling out; iPhone and Android get chat mode, with edit rolling out on iPhone. If you build reports on a phone, Copilot can explain the numbers but cannot rebuild the sheet there yet.

10 prompts to copy into Copilot in Excel

Swap the ranges and column names for your own. Microsoft's Copilot in Excel tips recommend naming ranges, starting broad and then refining with follow-ups, which is how these are written.

Formulas

1. Ask Copilot to "add a column after D that calculates the percentage change between columns B and C for every row, formatted as a percentage."
2. Ask it to "explain the formula in G14 step by step and tell me which cells it depends on." Use chat mode so nothing changes.
3. Ask it to "replace the nested IF formulas in column H with a single formula that returns the same results, and list any rows where the result differs."

Cleaning

4. Ask Copilot to "trim extra spaces in column A, split full names into first and last name columns, and flag rows where the email in column C is missing."
5. Ask it to "find duplicate order IDs in column B and highlight them in yellow without deleting anything."

Analysis and charts

6. Ask Copilot to "create a PivotTable on a new sheet that shows total revenue by region and month from the Sales table."
7. Ask it to "chart monthly revenue for 2026 as a line chart and mark the three months with the largest drop."
8. Ask it to "summarize the top 3 trends and any outliers in this sheet in five bullet points."

Replacing the old COPILOT function

9. Ask Copilot to "classify each of the sentiment entries in B2:B100 and add the result in a new column." This is Microsoft's own suggested replacement for =COPILOT("Classify sentiment", B2:B100).
10. Ask it to "summarize the feedback in A2:A20" or to "look up upcoming holidays in Seattle and add them to a new sheet," which uses the web search Copilot now runs with citations.

The pattern behind all ten: a verb, a target range, an output location. When a result is close but wrong, follow up in the same chat ("now exclude refunds") instead of starting over, because Copilot keeps the context of the previous step.

What happened to the COPILOT function?

Microsoft removed it. Starting September 14, 2026, the COPILOT function is no longer available in Excel, according to Microsoft's COPILOT function page. It was a preview feature, only ever offered through the Frontier and Microsoft 365 Insider programs, so most users never had it.

Old workbooks keep the results that were already calculated as cached values. The moment a cell with the function recalculates, it returns a #NAME? error. If you inherited a sheet built on it, paste the cached results as values before anything triggers a recalculation, then rebuild the logic with a pane prompt like prompt 9 above.

Why don't I see Copilot in Excel?

The button is missing for one of a handful of reasons, and Microsoft's own pages list most of them.

• Your plan does not include it. Microsoft 365 Basic and a free Microsoft account do not include Copilot in Excel.
• You are not the subscription owner. On Family, Microsoft limits AI to the owner; everyone else on the plan gets Excel without Copilot.
• Your organization turned it off. Microsoft says Copilot "might not be included with your Microsoft 365 subscription or available based on your organization's settings." IT controls this through Copilot Chat admin settings, and Copilot in Excel cannot be switched off on its own.
• Requirements are not met. Microsoft lists app version, license, network and privacy settings as requirements in its Copilot requirements page.
• "Unsupported file state." The file may be checked out in SharePoint, or saved in Strict Open XML format. Check it back in, or save it as a regular .xlsx.

If none of these apply, Microsoft's FAQ points to its troubleshooting guide for a missing Copilot button; signing in with the account that owns the plan and reopening the file from OneDrive are the first things to check.

Limits worth knowing before you rely on it

Copilot makes mistakes, and Microsoft says so in its FAQ: results can be inaccurate, and it advises against using Copilot for decisions in sensitive areas such as finance, legal or medical topics. In practice that means checking every formula it writes against a few rows you can verify by hand.

Usage is capped on home plans. Microsoft's AI usage page says some features have limits per time period and others draw on monthly AI credits, which you can track under Services & subscriptions. Personal and Family show "standard" usage for several features where Premium shows "extensive," and the Analyst and Researcher agents are not available on Personal or Family at all.

Language matters too. Copilot accepts prompts in dozens of languages, but Microsoft notes it was trained mostly on English sources and may perform less well otherwise.

Copilot in Excel vs ChatGPT for spreadsheets

Copilot works inside the workbook; ChatGPT works on a copy you upload or paste. That single difference drives the choice: Copilot can add a column, build a PivotTable and format the result in place, and plan mode lets you approve the steps. ChatGPT gives you formulas and analysis that you paste back by hand, which is slower but works with any spreadsheet app and any file location.

If your files live in OneDrive and you already pay for Microsoft 365, Copilot is the shorter path. If you work in Google Sheets or want an assistant outside the Microsoft account, our guide to using ChatGPT for Excel covers that route, and Copilot vs ChatGPT compares the two assistants more broadly.

Toolradar data: Toolradar evaluated 10 spreadsheet tools for its ranking updated October 28, 2026, and 6 of the 9 it lists have a free plan, so Excel's paid Copilot is one option among several. See Toolradar's best spreadsheets ranking and its Microsoft Excel page, or our roundups of the best AI for spreadsheets and AI spreadsheet tools.

Frequently asked questions

How this guide was put together

We read Microsoft's own pages on October 28, 2026: the Microsoft 365 plan comparison, Copilot for business pricing, Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing, the Copilot in Excel get-started guide, FAQ and tips, and the COPILOT function notice. Prices are US list prices; totals marked as our arithmetic multiply Microsoft's printed prices. The prompts are examples written for this guide, not outputs we recorded.

Cite this: Dupple, "How to Use Copilot in Excel in 2026 (Plans, Steps, Prompts)", November 2026.

Copilot in Excel is worth paying for once you use edit mode weekly. Want more workflows like these for AI at work? Try Dupple X →

Related

• Is Microsoft Copilot free?: what the free Copilot app covers.
• How to use ChatGPT for Excel: the upload-and-paste route.
• Best AI for spreadsheets: tools beyond Copilot.
• Copilot vs Gemini: Microsoft's assistant against Google's, including Sheets.
• Microsoft Copilot on Toolradar: the listing with plan details.
• Dupple learning hub: more guides on AI tools for work.