Overview

• Microsoft is rolling out the function to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers in the Beta Channel on Windows (Version 2509, Build 19212.20000 or later) and Mac (Version 16.101, Build 25081334 or later), with web access planned via the Frontier program.
• Users can type =COPILOT with a natural-language prompt and optional cell or range references, and the output can be nested with functions such as IF, SWITCH, LAMBDA, and WRAPROWS.
• Early demos show tasks including summarizing feedback, classifying or tagging text, generating lists and tables that spill into the grid, and converting plain-English instructions into formulas.
• COPILOT currently cannot pull live web or internal business data, enforces usage limits of 100 calls per 10 minutes and 300 per hour, and Microsoft advises reviewing outputs for accuracy in sensitive scenarios.
• Microsoft says inputs are not used to train models and remain confidential, and known issues include omitted rows in large returned arrays and dates output as text; some outlets report the feature runs on OpenAI’s gpt-4.1-mini.