Copilot for Finance

Guide
Updated with November 2024
Announcements
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a daily habit for people around the world—already, nearly
70% of Fortune 500 companies are using it.

Dow anticipates that Copilot will save it millions of dollars on shipping operations in the first
year; at Bank of Queensland Group, 70% of users are saving two and a half to five hours per
week; Eaton is speeding up internal documentation processes by 83%; and Accenture is
going big, rolling out Copilot to 100,000 employees.

In November 19th, 2024, there were quite a few announcements. In this guide, I give you the
most important for FP&A Teams and CFOs:

1. Copilot Actions: Automation for Finance Workflows ............................................................ 2

2. AI-Powered Agents in Copilot Studio, SharePoint and Teams ................................................ 3
3. Copilot in Excel New Features ............................................................................................. 6
4. Copilot Pages ................................................................................................................... 15
1. Copilot Actions: Automation for Finance Workflows
Microsoft introduced Copilot Actions, an advanced AI capability integrated into Microsoft
365. For FP&A teams, this tool can automate time-intensive tasks such as:

• Automated Meeting Summaries: Quickly capturing action items and key takeaways
from budget review or forecast meetings.

• Report Generation: Drafting financial reports with insightful narratives based on raw
data.

• Workflow Optimization: Automatically scheduling follow-ups and pulling in relevant

data for decision-making.

It works like this:

Copilot Actions uses a simple fill-in-the-blank interface, allowing you to create automated
workflows in seconds.

For example if you have the task of summarizing emails related to a specific topic (e.g.,
“employee benefits”) from the past week and receiving the summary via email, you can easily
fill the blanks in the prompt.
Some ideas for you to try with this feature for FP&A:

• Tracking Key Conversations: Automate summaries of email threads and Teams

messages related to budget discussions, forecast revisions, or vendor negotiations.
• Get updates on specific topics (e.g., “budget variance” or “cost-saving
initiatives”) without sifting through countless messages.

• Meeting Prep Automation: Receive a daily or weekly summary of relevant insights

ahead of leadership meetings, complete with past action items and unresolved
questions.

2. AI-Powered Agents in Copilot Studio, SharePoint and

Teams
AI agents are being embedded into SharePoint and Teams, enabling dynamic document and
collaboration management. With these agents you can:

Summarize Financial Reports and answer questions from data: AI can extract key metrics
and insights from financial statements or variance analyses.

The agent will be looking for information only available within your SharePoint site or files
you decide.

For specific projects or tasks, any SharePoint user can create a customized agent based on
the relevant files, folders, or sites, with just one click.

You can create agents in SharePoint from these three entry points:
 • The Copilot icon in the top ribbon (just like how you access the ready-made agent),
click “Create an agent” from the drop-down menu.

• Your document library, choose files and click “Create an agent” from the top menu.

• The Home tab on the left side of the screen, click the “+ New” drop-down menu and
select “Agent.”

Agents can easily be shared via email or within Teams chats, allowing teams to work with the
same accurate and relevant information.

Not only are coworkers able to use the agent that you shared, but @mentioning the agent in
a group chat setting gives the team a subject matter expert ready to assist and facilitate
collaboration.
Agents created using SharePoint data are file-based, with a “.agent” file extension format.
They are stored within the same site or folder where they were created.

Since they are files, you can manage them just like you manage other files. You can copy,
move, delete, or archive them.

And with Microsoft Copilot Studio integration, currently in private preview, you can
customize these agents further, such as with third-party sources, actions, and automation
workflows.

You can then publish the agent to the Teams app catalog.
3. Copilot in Excel New Features

At Ignite, Microsoft announced several new capabilities for Copilot in Excel:

• Copilot in Excel with Python is generally available in US (EN-US) for Windows

• You can create a table specific to your needs with Copilot

• Copilot helps you pull in data from your organization and search the web

• Copilot's enhanced text analysis capabilities provide new ways to reason over your
data and derive insights

Microsoft announced that Copilot in Excel with Python is generally available in US (EN-
US).

For deeper, more complex analyses, Copilot offers advanced capabilities that were previously
out of reach for many users.

With the ability to describe the desired analysis in natural language, Copilot can
automatically generate, explain, and insert Python code into Excel spreadsheets.

This lowers the barriers to entry, making advanced analytics accessible to a broader
audience, and unlocks powerful analytics via Python for visualizations, cleaning data,
machine learning, predictive analytics, and more - without needing to be Python proficient
yourself.
Copilot in Excel with Python also renders stunning visuals that were previously not possible
or were difficult to create.

Unique visuals like heatmaps, pairplots, multiplots, and violin plots help you understand and
communicate your analysis.

Note that if you don’t have Excel in the US (EN-US) you cannot make Copilot use Python
code but if you have Python in Excel available you are still able to use Copilot Chat to
generate Python code and then copy-paste that code in Excel to get the same visualizations.

I’ll leave a guide for this in my LinkedIn post.

But if you are in the US and have the EN-US version, to get started with Copilot in Excel with
Python, follow these steps:

1. Open Excel on Windows and load your data.

 2. Navigate to the Home tab, then select Copilot.

3. Select the Advanced analysis card in the task pane that opens.

Creating Tables

Whether creating a project budget, inventory tracker or sales report, starting from scratch to
create a spreadsheet that meets your needs can be daunting and time consuming. Copilot in
Excel’s new start experience enables people of all skill levels to create a personalized table
for their tasks.

Simply tell Copilot what you want to create, and Copilot will suggest and refine a template
with headers, formulas and visuals to get you off to a great start!

For instance, you can quickly create a table with information on your organization's sales
team.

Copilot can add columns, apply conditional formatting, and even change table colors on
command, streamlining the creation and adjustment process. Once you’re happy with your
table you can insert it on the page and continue using Copilot.

It will apply the conditional formatting for you:

Pull in data from the graph and search the web

Microsoft announced that Copilot in Excel can reference Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF
files from your organizational data.

For instance, you can ask Copilot in Excel to list the announcements from a newsletter
drafted in Word. Copilot will respond with a list that you can insert into a new spreadsheet or
copy and paste into your existing table.
For example, if you want to add budget details to your sales team table, you can simply describe
the data you need, and Copilot will import the relevant data from another Excel file into your
table.

Since this import is powered by Power Query, it ensures precise data is pulled directly from your
organization’s data sources, maintaining a live, refreshable connection. As data is updated in
the budget file, it will automatically update in your sales team table as well.

You can also seamlessly search the web directly within Copilot in Excel to find public
information like dates, statistics, and more without disrupting your workflow.

For instance, you can look up a table of countries and their exchange rates and easily copy
and paste the information into your table.
Summarise FP&A commentary and insights

Copilot can help you to summarise commentary you have received from business units or
other teams.

Simply say, “Summarise this commentary with the top insights for the CFO” for example:
It will read all the commentary in your table and get the key insights:

It can understand the sentiment of text too, which is especially helpful with survey data.

For example, you can ask “please summarize sentiment for column 'feedback'” and Copilot
will analyze and provide insight on positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

It will generate a summary for you:

You can also prompt it to insert sentiment data into the table as a new column.
4. Copilot Pages
Copilot Pages is a dynamic, persistent canvas that turns AI-generated content into a durable,
reusable resource.

Now, you will be able to prompt Copilot to create everything from interactive flow charts to
blocks of code—drawing from data across Microsoft Graph—then share them in durable
Pages your team can build upon.

Note that Microsoft is mentioning that this will be generally available in early 2025.

Pages will allow you to:

• Edit and Build on Content: Easily refine and expand on AI-generated drafts.

• Collaborate in Real Time: Work alongside teammates and Copilot on the same
page, seeing updates and contributions instantly.

• Leverage Multiple Data Sources: Seamlessly integrate data, files, and web resources
into your Pages.
Here's how you will be able to use Copilot Pages.

1. Access Copilot at Microsoft.com/Copilot. If you have an M365 Copilot license, you

will be able to also access Copilot in Teams and Outlook.

2. Chat with Copilot as you usually would. Once you receive a response you'd like to
keep, click 'Edit in Pages'. This will create a page and open it side-by-side the chat
with the response already copied and formatted, including link previews and code
blocks. A reference to the page will automatically be added in the chat.

3. Add and refine. You can continue your conversation in chat. Clicking 'Edit in Pages'
will add subsequent responses to the bottom of the page. Everything on the page is
editable - just click on the page and start typing. Pro tip: type "/" to view a menu of
content types that you can use.

4. Share and collaborate. When you are ready, you can share your page with others
who will be able to collaborate on it with you. People you share with will have access
to the page and its content, not your Copilot session. If you and your team have a
Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can view the page in full screen to use Copilot
directly within the page, adding to each other's prompts and collaborating on a final
output. Pro tip: Click the share icon in the upper right and select "Copy component"
to surface the page in a fully interactive way when you paste it in Teams or Outlook.

5. Access your pages. Return to your page at any time by clicking the link in the chat
where you first created the page or by opening the Pages tab in Microsoft365.com,
where you will see all the Pages that you previously created.