If you're reading this blog then there's a high likelihood that you are also using Excel to do some sort of analysis on some data. Whether you are adding a column of numbers, creating financial statements, or even doing statistical modeling, Excel is a great tool to analyze data.

But Tim, Excel has complex formulas and I don't have time to study all the formulas and methods available. Well, good news for you. The world of AI is at our fingertips and ready to do all of the hard work. I'm going to show you how to use Microsoft Copilot to help you with complex formulas and even some modeling. I like Copilot but any of the AI platforms, such as ChatGPT or Grok, will work just as well.

Scenario: I want to know which job I should be working on given time constraints, labor constraints, and profitability. How can I model that in Excel? Well, the screen snip below shows me asking Copilot how to do this type of optimization problem. Not only does it give me a starting point, but I can follow up and talk to the AI just as if I were talking to another human. It recognizes misspellings and even remembered some aspects of our previous conversations.

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OK. I guess I should ask the question directly. Wonder what Copilot will do.

Whoa! As you can probably guess. I can keep asking questions using natural language conversation and even click on suggested follow up questions. Eventually this question will give me a complete solution that I can drop right into an excel spreadsheet and start filling with data. If you didn't already know, optimization is something you might learn in college level calculus...only, we didn't need to go to school for this solution.

Perhaps you don't need a complex model, but rather a suggested formula to solve a question. Let's try asking something different.

Wow! Not only did Copilot ignore my misspellings, it even reframed my question showing it truly understood what I was after and offered some helpful tips to improve the visibility using conditional formatting. As you can see, AI is the wave of the future. If you don't climb on board then you may find yourself on the shore watching the cruise ship sail away.

If you would like to know more about how Copilot can be used for your own analysis, reach out to the team at ConstrucTech Consulting. We would love to help you and your business gain a competitive edge using AI and the data you have at hand.

Psst. Here's a little secret. This can even be used to analyze your Vista data way better and faster than your best business analyst. And if you're the business analyst, nobody needs to know you got a little help from AI.

Psst Psst. Also, if you're tired of searching for images for things like this blog post. Ask your AI to create an image for you.