Microsoft recently released Co-Pilot for Microsoft 365. This is a nice addition because Co-Pilot has been around for a while, but now Microsoft has made it work within the Office applications. I want to show you how you can use it in Excel and utilize BC data to get results, so let’s get started.

Co-Pilot is a brand that Microsoft uses for generative AI across its many products. There are many versions of Co-Pilot, but they recently released Co-Pilot in Microsoft 365 with no minimum user count. It used to be that you could get Co-Pilot with Microsoft 365, but you had to have a large number of users to get the product. Now, you can get it with just a single user if you want to. So, that’s what I did, and I’m going to show you how to use it with Excel, and we’re going to use data directly from Business Central, and we’re going to use a number of prompts to get different results. So, here we go.

Analyzing Business Central Data in Excel with Co-Pilot

Introduction to Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot

The first thing I want to look at is the customer ledger entries from Business Central. I’m going to download those into Excel and then run Co-Pilot on it using this prompt right here. Here’s my Business Central tenant, and I’m going to open up the customer ledger entries. This is a standard list in Business Central, and I’m going to look just at the invoices. So, I use that filter there, and then I’m going to download it into Excel. So, here’s the data direct from Business Central. I want to save this up to the cloud so I can use Co-Pilot to analyze this data. I’m going to upload it right here, and as soon as I do that, that activates Co-Pilot. You can see it lit up here. This is the way it looks in the Office apps. It’s an icon here. I’m going to click on that. The way that generative AI usually works is that the user provides a prompt; Co-Pilot will take that and give results. So, I’m going to put my prompt in right here. You can see it, and then I’m going to start Co-Pilot, and we’ll watch it go. It’ll take a little while; it’s understanding the data, analyzing the data, looking at my request, and it’s going to give me some results. So, you can see the first set of results; it’s a graph, and then here’s some text about it. So, what I can do with this graph is I go here, I can add it to my sheet. I’m just going to add this to my worksheet as well so we can see the results. Co-Pilot provided a response based on my prompt, looking at the BC data; you can see that here. You created a nice graph; this is in Excel obviously, and from here I can use it any way that I want to.

Conclusion and Future Considerations

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Exploring Item Ledger Entries

Let’s look at another example using the item ledger entries. I have got three prompts ready to go for this, so we’ll see what Co-Pilot does with these prompts and see the results that we get. Here are my item ledger entries. I’m going to prompt Co-Pilot to look at this data and provide some results. I want to just look at the item sales, so I put a filter just for item sales. I’m going to download that to Excel again. I want to save this up to the cloud, so let’s get started.

I’ll start Co-Pilot up. This is my first prompt; I want to add a column and show profitability by line, so let’s run that. And this is the first response from Co-Pilot. Analyze the data suggested this formula right here. I’m going to insert this column; that column’s inserted. I want to go to the next prompt now and get some more information, and I’ve got another result from Co-Pilot. I’m going to add that to my worksheet as well. I’ll add that, and with Excel, Co-Pilot is expecting all the data to be in a table. You can see that Co-Pilot is not responsive now because I’m not looking at a table. Let’s go back to the table; it lights up again. And I’ve got one more prompt; let’s run that prompt, and this is the final result. I’m going to add this to the worksheet as well. I add that; I’ve got these worksheets right here; you can see them. So, the first thing I did was download this information from Business Central into Excel. I activated Co-Pilot by saving it up to the cloud, and I had Co-Pilot add a column to give me the profitability by line, and then I asked Co-Pilot to find the most profitable item in my inventory; you see that result here. And then next, I said let’s look at the customers which customer group is providing the most profitability to me.

This was a quick demonstration of how you can use Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot with Dynamics 365 Business Central and also Excel. I would expect that this type of functionality is going to be used on more of an ad hoc basis. A salesperson, a sales manager has an idea, wants to find out some information from all this data that’s in his ERP system, he can easily go to Co-Pilot, download that information into Excel, and analyze it from there. A lot of this stuff you could do with basic Excel functionality, but Co-Pilot makes it a little easier, also maybe a little faster if you’re going to do the same type of thing over and over again. It probably makes sense to look at a different reporting tool, something like Power BI. Power BI is a great reporting tool; you can really get a lot of nice reports out of it in graphs and dashboards, but it takes some development time. If you want to get answers quick, consider using Co-Pilot with Dynamics 365 Business Central and Excel.