Copilot in Excel Outperforms Complex Prompting Methods

Microsoft Excel user Tony Phillips experimented with three different methods to build an AI-powered dashboard using Copilot in Excel. He found that giving Copilot a clear goal and letting it work out the route resulted in the most effective and user-friendly dashboard.

In his first test, Phillips asked Copilot to analyze 5,000 movie-viewing records and identify interesting patterns. The dashboard created by Copilot was interactive and easy to follow but reflected what Copilot found most interesting in the dataset, which was repeat viewing. However, this resulted in other important metrics being left out.

For his second test, Phillips asked Copilot's web-based chatbot to analyze the data and recommend a dashboard. The recommendations were more detailed but led to an overly complex dashboard with too many charts and calculations.

In his third test, Phillips simplified the prompt by giving Copilot only the basic information about the movie-viewing records and asking it to build a useful interactive dashboard. This approach resulted in a much simpler yet still effective dashboard.