Microsoft fixes one of Excel Copilot's most frustrating limitations

Microsoft began integrating Copilot into Excel a couple of years ago and has been upgrading it with new functionalities since then. While some changes have been controversial, Microsoft is hoping to win over users by allowing them to be more productive via Copilot. To that end, it has now announced a Copilot improvement that may actually be appreciated by people who use it regularly.

Excel customers often use the Copilot prompt box to issue instructions to format and customize their data, but it can become quite tiring to keep repeating the same instructions again and again. Microsoft now allows you to define Copilot personalization rules for formatting, naming conventions, formulas, and report styles. These can be accessed via Settings > Personalization, where you can explain your rules in natural language like "Always format currency in USD with no decimals", and just let Copilot take care of the rest.

Microsoft is going a step further in this direction by allowing you to set workbook rules too. These rules are stored as a .Rules sheet, and are preserved while the workbook is shared. This fosters collaboration while making sure that standard rules govern the Copilot editing experience across the organization. Other advantages of this capability include pointing it to specific examples, defining dynamic formulas, and referencing an entire sheet and asking Copilot to infer rules based on that. You can leverage this feature by opening Copilot in Excel, clicking on "+", and selecting Create workbook rules. If you have an existing .Rules sheet, you can simply start listing the rules in column A as well.

Personalization features are available to all Copilot in Excel users across the web, Mac, and Windows. Meanwhile, workbook rules are currently being previewed for Windows and Mac customers on the Insiders channel. General availability is scheduled after a few weeks, but a concrete date is currently unknown. Overall, the Excel capability is quite similar to ChatGPT's memory features, which allow you to permanently store items in the AI model's context window.