Copilot in Excel gets major boost with smarter context awareness and data highlights

Microsoft has been continuously baking Copilot into its products and advertising it more often these days. Speaking of Copilot, now, Excel is getting some serious upgrades in that regard. If you’ve used the AI assistant in spreadsheets before, you know it worked best when you selected specific cells first. Well, not anymore.

In a new blog post, Microsoft says Copilot is now context-aware in Excel. That means it can figure out what you’re working on—even without you manually selecting cells.

You can now ask things like “Show me insights about the data I was just analyzing” or “Sort the table in the top-right,” and Copilot will understand what you mean. It’s a significant change from the old behavior, which relied entirely on selected cells.

This new intelligence comes from combining what Microsoft calls “cell signals” with your chat history. Basically, Copilot now builds a bigger mind map of your activity and the layout of your workbook.

That’s not all; Excel will now highlight the data Copilot is using to generate answers. So if something feels off, you can adjust the dataset or steer Copilot in a better direction.

These upgrades are already live on the web and on desktop versions for Windows and Mac. Here’s what to look for:

• Smart context awareness:
  • Windows: Version 2505 (Build 18623.20058)
  • Mac: Version 16.95 (Build 2506.3090)
• Visual highlights:
  • Windows: Version 2505 (Build 18705.20000)
  • Mac: Version 16.96 (Build 2506.4070)