I stumbled upon a new AI feature in Microsoft Excel that’s genuinely useful. Here’s what it is and why you should know about it.

I was scrolling through my feeds the other day and stumbled onto something interesting about Microsoft Excel. It turns out, Microsoft quietly added a feature called Excel Agent Mode. I hadn’t heard a peep about it, which is surprising because, after trying it out, I can say it’s genuinely useful. It’s not every day you find a new tool that can actually cut down on the boring, repetitive parts of spreadsheet work, so I had to dig in and see what it was all about.

If you spend any amount of time wrangling data, you’ll want to know about this. It’s an AI-powered feature that acts like a smart assistant living right inside your workbook.

So, What Exactly is Excel Agent Mode?

Think of it like having a data analyst you can talk to. Instead of you having to remember complex formulas or click through a dozen menus, you can just tell Excel what you want to do in plain English. This goes way beyond the formula suggestions or basic charting we’ve seen before. Excel Agent Mode is designed to understand and execute multi-step tasks.

For example, you could give it a messy dataset and say something like:
* “Clean up this data by removing duplicate rows.”
* “Then, format the ‘Date’ column to show month and year.”
* “Finally, create a pivot table summarizing sales by region.”

The “Agent” part is key. It acts on your behalf to perform a sequence of actions, which is a big step up from the single-shot commands we’re used to with AI assistants. It’s less of a calculator and more of a partner for exploring and cleaning your data. You can find the official, albeit brief, guide on the Microsoft Support page.

How to Get Started with Excel Agent Mode

Before you go looking for it, there’s a catch. This is a “frontier” feature, which is Microsoft’s way of saying it’s new, experimental, and might change. Access is also limited. As of late 2025, you need one of the following:

• An enterprise Microsoft 365 Copilot license
• A Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription

So, it’s not available for everyone just yet, but it shows the direction Microsoft is heading. It’s part of the broader Microsoft Copilot ecosystem, which aims to integrate AI across all Office apps. If you have the right subscription, you should see it as part of your Copilot interface in Excel.

What Can This New Excel AI Actually Do?

I played around with some of the sample prompts and came up with a few practical scenarios where this could be incredibly helpful. The real power is in combining steps without having to do each one manually.

Here are a few examples of what you could ask it to do:

• Quick Data Cleaning: “In the ‘Revenue’ column, remove the dollar signs and convert the format to a number.” This alone saves a bunch of clicks and potential “find and replace” errors.
• Smart Analysis: “Find the top 5 products by profit margin and create a bar chart to visualize them. Make the bar for the highest margin product green.” This is analysis and visualization in one sentence.
• Conditional Formatting: “Go through the ‘Inventory’ column and highlight any cell with a value less than 20 in red.” It’s a simple task, but doing it with your voice feels faster.
• Combining Datasets: You could even ask it to “Compare the sales figures in this sheet with the projections in ‘Sheet2’ and create a new table showing the variance.”

The goal is to let you focus on what the data means, not the mechanics of manipulating it.

Is It Worth It?

My honest take? If you already have a subscription that includes it, using the Excel Agent Mode is a no-brainer. It has a slight learning curve, mostly in figuring out how to phrase your requests, but it can save a significant amount of time on tedious tasks. It’s especially powerful for those who aren’t Excel wizards but need to get answers from their data quickly.

It’s not perfect, of course. Since it’s a frontier feature, it might misunderstand complex requests or fail on very large, messy datasets. But for everyday data cleaning, analysis, and visualization, it feels like a glimpse into a much simpler way of working with spreadsheets.

It’s one of those quiet updates that might just change how you work. If you get a chance, give it a try. I’d love to hear what you think of it.