Use Excel's AI to Analyze Your Pipeline

What This Does

Excel Copilot lets you ask natural-language questions about your pipeline spreadsheet and get instant filtered views, summaries, and flags, without writing a single formula. You can find at-risk files, aging items, and closing-date bottlenecks in seconds.

Before You Start

• You have Microsoft 365 (Excel with Copilot enabled)
• Your pipeline is in an Excel spreadsheet with columns like borrower name, status, last contact date, closing date, outstanding items
• The Copilot icon is visible in the lower-right corner of the Excel window

Steps

1. Open your pipeline spreadsheet

Open your Excel pipeline file. Copilot no longer requires your data to be a formal table, but it does need one header row with clear, unique column names and no merged cells or blank rows. Formatting the range as a table (click anywhere in your data → Insert → Table) is still worth doing because it keeps ranges stable as you add files.

2. Open Copilot

Click the Copilot icon in the lower-right corner of the Excel window. A chat panel will open on the right side of your screen. Microsoft moved Copilot off the Home ribbon in 2026, so this corner button is now the one entry point; press F6 to reach it by keyboard, or right-click it and choose Move to ribbon if you prefer the old placement.

3. Ask your first question

Type a natural-language question about your data. Start with something simple to verify it's working.

4. Act on the results

Copilot will highlight rows, create a filtered view, or add a new column based on your question. You can ask follow-up questions in the same chat panel.

What you should see: Copilot highlights the relevant rows or generates a table of results in a new sheet. Troubleshooting: If Copilot says it can't read your data, check for merged cells, blank rows or columns, and missing headers, then try again.

Real Example

Scenario: You have 62 active files and need to know which ones haven't had a borrower contact in over 5 days and are closing within the next 21 days.

What you type: "Show me all files where the Last Contact Date column is more than 5 days before today AND the Closing Date column is within the next 21 days. Sort by Closing Date ascending."

What you get: A filtered view of your most urgent at-risk files, sorted so you can work down the list in priority order. Instead of manually sorting and filtering, you get the answer in 10 seconds.

Tips

• You can ask follow-up questions: "Now show me just the ones in underwriting status"
• Ask Copilot to add a new column: "Add a column called Priority Score that calculates days until closing minus days since last contact"
• Use it for weekly reporting: "Create a summary showing how many files are in each status" gives you an instant pipeline report for your LO meeting

Tool interfaces change, if Copilot has moved, look for the Copilot icon in the corner of the window or a similar AI option nearby.