The prevalence of Copilot in ‘What’s New in Excel’

As you may know, major Excel updates have taken a backseat over the past 18 months so Microsoft can prioritise Copilot rollouts. I’ve moaned about this a few times, as I long for a return to the period between 2020 and 2023, when we were treated to a cavalcade of game-changing new features and functions.

Well, we have some promising news…

July’s ‘What’s New in Excel’ is the first since May 2024 NOT to contain a single instance of “Copilot”.

I’m not anti-Copilot by any means. It’s clear it will play a big role going forward in the AI-first world we live in, so I have been keeping an eye on it. However, it’s worth remembering that Copilot may not be ‘beta’ by name, but it certainly is by nature — and will be for the foreseeable future. Therefore, I feel no urge to go all-in on it for now.

Moreover, for Copilot to thrive, it needs to evolve in tandem with Excel. After all, Copilot can’t do anything more than what Excel permits manually. For example, if you prompt Copilot to apply conditional formatting to a range, it will — but it’s still using the outdated conditional formatting system we have, which is deeply fragile, inefficient, and incompatible with dynamic arrays.

The point is, these things need to improve for Copilot to be truly great. So I’m hoping Microsoft will see it the same way before they hit a ceiling.

Anyway, after doing my investigation, I can conclude:

• September 2023 was the first edition in which “Copilot” was mentioned (10 times).
• April 2024 had the highest instances of “Copilot”.
• The average instances of “Copilot” were 10.67 for January to June 2025 and 11.67 for June to November 2024.