5 Ways Microsoft Copilot Saves Time for Marketing & Events Tasks

Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. (Well, we’ve got to start somewhere!) 

This time E is for Excel. Ahh Excel. 

I ruddy love Excel. Also, I ruddy hate Excel. (Relate???) 

I love it because I know it’s a ridiculously powerful tool and, used properly, can do loads of cool and quirky things. 

I hate it because I only dabble in it, so although I know it can do cool things, I can never remember how to do the cool things, and it’s so frustrating! 

Recently I’ve been using Copilot to turn those everyday Excel sheet woes into wins.  

In my A blog, we’ve already seen how the Analyst Agent can give concise insights when you have lots of lovely data, but if you work in events, marketing, comms, or content – here’s 5 ways Copilot in Excel can save you a bucketload of time and brainpower.

Note: Make sure you’ve got your sheet saved in the cloud (SharePoint or OneDrive) – if it’s just on your local machine, Copilot can’t “see” the data you’re working with. 

It’s so handy having the Copilot pane right inside Excel, no flipping between tabs or screens to ask questions and get answers:

Let’s say you have a sheet of event attendees, webinar registrations, or newsletter subscribers – here’s what you can do with that data in your sheet: 

1. Tidy it up 

I know your eyes hurt when you look at a sheet of data and the formatting is all over the place. Some names are ALL CAPS. Some names are small caps. Phone numbers in all sorts of different styles, dates in text as well as numbers. 

Ask Copilot to tidy it all up for you – be specific about what you want; “Make all dates in dd/mm/yyyy format.” 

2. Remove internal employees 

You ran a webinar – it got lots of support from internal employees, which is great, but they don’t count towards your leads metric. To stop them all cluttering up your KPIs, ask Copilot “Remove everyone on this sheet who has an [insert internal domain name] email address.” 

3. Easy summaries 

You want to know how many individuals attended your event, sure, but you also want to know how many individual companies attended too. Even if you only have a list of email addresses, Copilot can make this leap for you. Ask Copilot “Tell me how many individual companies are on this list and what the total number of companies is. Use the domain names as a best guess.” 

4. Pick out your target leads 

Tell Copilot: “Our target customer organisation is [number of employees, industry, revenue numbers, and anything else relevant] – which companies on this list fit that profile?” – no more trawling through info manually.  

Now here’s one for the customer success team: 

5. Get a heads up on upcoming renewals 

If you have a list of customer info that includes renewal dates, you probably want to know more than a month out when a renewal is due. I think it would be great if a sheet did this ‘at a glance’ by using a colour. Tell Copilot: “In this sheet, renewal dates are all in column K. Relative to whatever date today is, if the date in column K is less than a month away from today, I want to highlight the cell yellow. Can you do this for me?” 

Copilot will teach you 

In most cases when you use Copilot in Excel, it will first give you options and instructions for how you can achieve the formatting or function that you’re after by implementing it yourself. I love this because I do like to know how things work. 

One of the options is usually “would you like me to do this for you?” – and in this case you can get Copilot to do all of the work without having to know how to do it yourself.  

Surprise sheets 

Something that caught me out when I’ve been using Copilot to perfom actions for me in Excel is that it doesn’t complete the action in the sheet that you’re actually ‘in’. I was expecting the data in my sheet to change before my very eyes but not so. 

What actually happens is that Copilot creates a new version of the sheet with the changes made there. 

This is great because it means that Copilot doesn’t totally mess up your data if anything bad happens; it will only mess up a copy of it. 

This is also terrible because if you tinker a lot like me, you’ll end up with many different versions of the tweaked sheet. If you’re bad at filing like me (shocking, I know), version control and finding the ‘right’ document later will be a nightmare. (Or – I’ll have to be much better at filing.)

Be better than me people! Rename your new sheets straight away and save them in the appropriate place. Future you will thank you. 

What have you been struggling with in Excel lately, maybe Copilot could help you out? Let me know in the comments.