Excel Copilot: Customize for Your Needs

Key insights

• Copilot in Excel now supports personalization and workbook rules so the assistant follows your saved preferences instead of giving the same generic answers every time.
  
• In a side-by-side demo, running the same prompt with and without personalization produced different formulas, chart styling, and overall usefulness — personalization makes results more relevant to your workflow.
  
• To set preferences, open the Copilot pane, pick the Settings > Personalization option, enter short specific instructions, and save them; those settings are stored on your account and apply across workbooks.
  
• Workbook rules let teams embed reusable instructions inside a file so everyone gets consistent outputs for formatting, formulas, and reporting conventions without rewriting prompts each time.
  
• Direct instructions in a prompt override saved preferences, and account-saved settings apply broadly across devices (features may vary by platform), giving predictable behavior unless you request otherwise.
  
• Benefits include reduced prompting friction, greater consistency, and faster edits; practical tips: keep data well structured, write short clear preferences, and test changes by repeating a task before and after personalization.
  

Overview

Alan Murray of Computergaga published a YouTube video titled Make Copilot in Excel that demonstrates how minor settings changes can produce dramatically different outputs from Copilot in Excel. In the clip, Murray runs the same data task twice: first with default settings and then after configuring personalization options. The contrast shows how default responses can feel generic, while custom preferences yield targeted, usable results.

Consequently, the video acts as a practical how-to rather than a feature announcement: it walks viewers to the exact settings pane and recommends short, specific phrasing for preferences. Murray highlights that the same dataset and the same prompt returned different formulas, chart styling, and overall usefulness after personalization. Therefore, the piece serves both as a demonstration and a short guide for users who want more predictable AI behavior in spreadsheets.

What the video demonstrates

First, Murray asks Copilot in Excel to build a summary and a chart from a sales dataset with no personalization applied, producing a reasonable but generic result. Then, he opens the Copilot pane, navigates to the Settings menu, and enters brief personalization instructions intended to match his preferred output style. Finally, running the identical workflow again, he shows how the model adapts formulas, formatting, and chart choices to match those saved preferences.

Importantly, the video emphasizes clarity and brevity when writing preferences: concise statements yield the most consistent results. Murray also notes that explicit instructions in a one-off prompt override saved preferences, which keeps personalized behavior flexible when exceptions are needed. As a result, viewers see both the power and the limits of personalization in a concise demonstration.

How personalization and workbook rules work

According to the video’s walkthrough, you set personalization by opening the Copilot pane, selecting the three-dot menu, and choosing Personalization. Once saved, those preferences attach to your account and influence future prompts across workbooks unless a prompt gives a different direction. In other words, personalization aims to reduce repeated instructions and keep outputs aligned with your typical style.

Additionally, Murray explains the role of workbook rules, which standardize behavior inside a shared file so everyone gets consistent outputs. These rules let teams define formatting, formula conventions, and chart styling that Copilot should follow when working in that workbook. Therefore, organizations can combine personal preferences and shared rules to balance individual productivity with team consistency.

Benefits and tradeoffs

On the positive side, personalization reduces repetitive prompting and speeds common workflows by applying a saved style to new tasks, which can save time and reduce friction. Likewise, workbook rules improve consistency across team documents, making reports and dashboards easier to maintain. These advantages are especially valuable when Copilot’s default outputs are merely acceptable rather than ideal.

However, tradeoffs exist. Personalized behavior saved to an account can create surprises for colleagues if a shared workbook still reflects an individual’s defaults, so teams must coordinate settings and rules. Moreover, personalization can mask edge cases where a prompt should have explicitly commanded a different approach, which introduces a modest risk of incorrect assumptions. Therefore, balancing convenience with clarity requires clear guidelines and occasional overrides.

Challenges in practice

Implementing personalization and workbook rules also raises practical challenges around ambiguity, governance, and cross-platform consistency. For example, short preference statements must be precise enough to be useful but not so narrow that they break when data changes. Meanwhile, differences in feature availability across Windows, Mac, and mobile platforms can create uneven behavior for distributed teams.

Furthermore, teams need processes to review and update preferences and rules, because spreadsheet standards evolve and data structures change. Debugging AI-generated formulas also requires users to validate results, so reliance on Copilot demands strong data hygiene and version control. Overall, organizations should test settings in staging workbooks and document conventions before applying them widely.

Practical recommendations and next steps

Murray’s video leaves viewers with several actionable steps: try simple, clear preferences in the Personalization pane, test changes on a copy of a workbook, and use explicit prompts to override saved rules when necessary. He also suggests that teams draft shared workbook rules for consistent formatting and formulas while keeping personal settings for individual style choices. As a result, users can gain speed without sacrificing clarity or reproducibility.

Finally, while the video encourages interaction—asking viewers to like and subscribe—its core lesson is practical: personalization makes Copilot in Excel far more useful when set up thoughtfully. Therefore, both individual users and teams benefit from experimenting with settings, documenting conventions, and validating outputs, so Copilot becomes an effective assistant rather than a source of repeated manual adjustments.

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