While AI gets all the hype for writing reports and chatting away as a help bot, it is easy to forget that CoPilot for Excel can be your number one super guy.
Have you or your team ever wrestled with a messy spreadsheet full of typos, inconsistent dates and rogue spaces?
If your team inputs timesheets or project data manually, you’ll know how shockingly creative humans can be with spelling, formatting, and general randomness.
Microsoft CoPilot actively monitors your Excel files, spotting inconsistencies and suggesting ways to clean them on opening each file.
If you review and accept its suggestions, it will do the hard work for you to fix them quicker than the human eye.
If you disagree, then click ignore, and CoPilot never takes it personally.
🔍 What kind of mess can it fix?
Here are some examples CoPilot found within just one month’s timesheet data for one of our clients:
🔹 AJ Smith vs A J Smith (because spaces matter)
🔹 Travel time vs Travel time vs travel time (Doctor Who or Doctor who?)
🔹 Ltd vs Limited (a classic)
🔹 Rose vs Rosemary (one person, two results)
🔹 Random trailing spaces (subtle but deadly for analysis)
💡 So what? Why should a small business care?
If you’ve ever used Excel for pivot tables, filtering, or reporting, you’ll know how these tiny inconsistencies can wreck your reports.
For example, it will give you a result for how many times ‘Rosemary’ has answered the phone at police headquarters, and another result for how many times ‘Rose’ has done the same.
You will also know how long these types of inconsistencies take to fix.
In fact, a busy finance team member may throw up their hands and declare they do not have the time to make those fixes. Meaning you missed out on receiving some key insights.
So, with CoPilot diving into the bottom of the filing cabinet for you and emerging from the top drawer, it ensures (without needing Spot the cat to bang the top):
🔹 Clean data = better reports = smarter decisions
🔹 Less manual fixing = more time for high-value work
🔹 Fewer mistakes = more accurate forecasting and insights with a groovy style
It won’t replace human judgment, but it will save time and reduce errors.
Would you trust AI to clean up your spreadsheets?