Microsoft just gave Copilot in Excel a serious upgrade for anyone who spends their day buried in spreadsheets. The update centers on three things finance teams actually care about: reusable workflows, live data straight from trusted sources, and a clear record of exactly what Copilot edited in your sheet.

How Copilot Skills automates your finance workflows

The standout feature here is called Skills. It lets you tell Copilot exactly how to handle the repeatable stuff, like building a DCF, closing the books, or putting together a variance analysis.

Instead of typing out the same detailed prompt every single time, you just save a SKILL.md file in OneDrive, and Copilot follows your steps, formatting, and structure on its own from then on. You can also use Microsoft’s prebuilt finance skills or build your own from scratch. Later this year, partners like LSEG, Ramp, Rogo, and Vena will also sell their own skills through Microsoft Marketplace.

On top of that, Copilot can now pull live data right into your workbook through new connectors with CB Insights, Daloopa, FactSet, Morningstar, PitchBook, and S&P Global, joining the LSEG and Moody’s connectors that showed up back in May. That means a lot less copy-pasting from reports and more analysis grounded in current numbers, though a few of these connectors will need their own separate subscription.

Finally, you track every change Copilot makes in Excel

AI and finance have always had a trust problem, so Microsoft built in a Plan with Copilot mode that lays out exactly which ranges, formulas, and assumptions it’s about to touch before it touches anything. Every edit stays fully traceable afterward, and the Show Changes pane now clearly tags what Copilot did versus what a human teammate did.

It builds on Excel’s existing Agent Mode and comes right after Microsoft’s recent acquisition of finance AI startup Fintool, both pointing to how serious Microsoft is getting about finance specifically. These updates are live now for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers on Excel for Web, Windows, and Mac, with custom Skills rolling out to everyone over the next month.