Microsoft’s Office apps are getting more useful Copilot AI features

Microsoft is unveiling new features in its $30 per user Microsoft 365 Copilot monthly subscriptions that are designed to improve AI integration inside of Office apps. Excel is getting Python integration inside of Copilot, PowerPoint has an improved AI-powered narrative builder, Word is getting better at AI-assisted drafts, and Copilot will be able to help you organize your Outlook inbox, too.

After bringing Python to Excel last year, Microsoft is now combining its Python support with Copilot to let Excel users easily perform advanced analysis on spreadsheet data. “Now, anyone can work with Copilot to conduct advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data — all using natural language, no coding required,” says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of AI at work at Microsoft. “It’s like adding a skilled data analyst to the team.”

The Copilot and Python integration inside of Excel enters public preview today, just as Microsoft makes Copilot in Excel generally available to its Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers. Microsoft has also added Copilot support for XLOOKUP and SUMIF, conditional formatting, and the ability for the AI assistant to produce more charts and PivotTables.

Copilot in PowerPoint is also getting improvements, with an improved narrative builder that’s designed to let you quickly create a first draft of a slide deck. The AI assistant will even soon use a company’s branded template to create drafts or company-approved images from SharePoint libraries.

Copilot in Microsoft Teams will summarize conversations that happened in the text chat as well as spoken ones in meetings later this month. This will help meeting organizers make sure they didn’t miss any unanswered questions that were typed into the chat. “Our customers tell us Copilot in Teams has changed meetings forever — in fact, it’s the number one place they’re seeing value,” says Spataro.

I’ve personally been waiting for improvements to Copilot in Outlook beyond drafting and summaries, and now Microsoft is starting to allow its AI assistant to organize your inbox. A new “prioritize my inbox” feature lets Copilot automatically prioritize emails. Later this year, you’ll also be able to “teach Copilot the specific topics, keywords, or people that are important to you,” according to Spataro. These emails will then also be marked as high priority in your inbox.

Later this month, Microsoft is also improving Copilot in Word to let you reference data from emails and meetings, alongside data from documents. This will make it easier to bring in attachments from emails or entire talking points from meetings. Microsoft is also rolling out Copilot in OneDrive later this month, making it easy to summarize and compare up to five files to spot differences between them.

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Microsoft’s improvements to Copilot in Office are designed to make the AI assistant more enticing to businesses, alongside a new Copilot Pages feature and AI agents that will automate certain tasks. Recent reports have suggested there has been a lukewarm reception to Microsoft’s paid Copilot version for businesses, due to bugs and a reluctance to pay the $30 per user price.

Microsoft says 60 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Copilot and that the number of people who use Copilot daily at work “nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter.” Both of these data points appear to include the free version of Copilot. Microsoft has won over a big customer for Microsoft 365 Copilot: Vodafone is signing up for 68,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for its 100,000 employees, after trialing the AI assistant and seeing early benefits.