Creating formulas and functions faster with Copilot

- [Narrator] Formulas and functions are the backbone of Excel. And if you thought AI meant you'd never have to write one again, let's say you're about half right. Refer to the Exercise File 02_01-formulas_functions to follow along. So we'll go ahead and launch Copilot, App Skills. Now, you may or may not get a suggested card here, and if you do, we can try it out here. It says, "Suggest a formula column," just to get us into the groove of how calculated columns will work. Now it looks like Copilot is suggesting that we make a premium size column here. It's effectively an if statement. And if we want to learn more about these functions, there will be a Show explanation dropdown. If we'd like this column, we can insert it and see how it looks. And I'll go ahead and undo that. And we'll add our own columns here just to see how specifying our own calculations will work here, but similar process. So for example, let's say we're not really loving the Status column being entirely an uppercase. I will suggest my own calculated column now, (computer keys clacking) and I'm going to get the proper function returned. You might get something different. If you want to see how that works, you can always get the explanation and add it. If you want a specific function, you are certainly welcome to ask Copilot to use that function and be more precise in your directions. Let's continue to experiment here. The Size column indicates measurements and ounces. I'd like this to be in cups and I'm not really sure about the exact conversion rate, and I want to know if Copilot can help here. So let's make that request. (computer keys clacking) So here I'll specify what I want to happen, what I want the new column to be named, and we'll get a result. Okay, and there's the conversion unit. We'll insert the column and there we have it. Lastly, let's try to aggregate data from one of these columns rather than doing a calculated column. Let's say we want to find the average price across all items. Now here we get a formula. It tells us how to do the average of price. For some reason, Copilot wants to insert this as a total row in our worksheet. That's not really what we want. So we will just copy this and move it to where we would want in the worksheet. You may get your results back as a pivot table. You might even get Python code. So there are a lot of ways that we can get an average in Excel. If you aren't getting the format that you want, just be more specific, right? "What is the average of price? "Use a formula or function." So rather this way than leaving it up to chance, the output that we get, whether that's, like I said, a pivot table, Python, we can specify in a little more detail what we want this to look like. And then again, we'll get the same formula here. We're not going to put it in the table. We can just copy and paste and drop it wherever we want in our workbook. So while your days of manually crafting formulas aren't entirely behind you, this process is going to undergo a significant transformation.