Learning Generative AI Tools for Excel

Chapter 9. Data Analysis with Copilot

This past summer, I was out in the countryside with my family, picking blackberries. We do this every year: we eat some straight off the brambles, and we bring the rest home. One year I even tried making jam, though I’ll admit it wasn’t much of a success.

As I was picking, something struck me. I wasn’t gathering every berry in sight. I was selective, taking only the plumpest and ripest ones. And that’s when the analogy hit me: data analysis is a lot like berry picking. You don’t use every piece of data; you focus on the best data, the parts of the dataset that lead to meaningful insights.

Think of the brambles as a table with many columns. The berries are like the columns you care about. The skill lies in filtering, in choosing which data to focus on so that the important signals stand out from the noise. That’s exactly why, in this chapter, we’ll explore techniques for building PivotTables, which is a way of separating the ripe berries from the rest.

But there’s more to it. When you’re in the field, you notice that some berries aren’t ready yet; you need to come back a day or two later. Data can be similar. Sometimes the answer isn’t directly present in the raw numbers. Through What-If Analysis, you can simulate scenarios and see how outcomes might change if certain conditions were different.

Of course, no single chapter can cover every data analysis technique that Excel provides. My goal here is to give you a foundation, a way of thinking ...