Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant available in popular Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It utilizes advanced language models, including GPT-4o, and enterprise data from Microsoft Graph, which includes documents, presentations, emails, files, meetings, and chats.
While Copilot in Excel already assists with tasks like generating formulas, suggesting charts, and analyzing PivotTables, Microsoft recently announced a new feature called "Clean Data." This allows users to clean data with a single click, detecting and resolving common issues such as text inconsistencies, number format issues, and extra spaces.
To use this feature, select the "Clean Data" option in the Data tab or utilize the pop-up banner (see screenshot below).
Clean Data feature will fix following data issues for now:
Text inconsistencies: Identify unnoticed variations across similar values that could cause subsequent problems. For example, a column with a mix of uppercase and lowercase text in the cells; or cells in a column containing differences in punctuation or diacritics.
Number format inconsistency: This feature seeks to identify columns with a mix of both Text and Number formatted cells that could result in incorrect calculations. Clean Data will locate these inconsistencies and will help you convert the ‘Text’ formatted cells to a number format.
Extra space removal: Clean Data will also detect and suggest the removal of unnecessary spaces in the highlighted table – such as extra leading spaces, trailing spaces, and between-value spaces.
Clean Data works best with data formatted as an Excel table, up to 100 columns and 50,000 rows. To create an Excel table, users can click anywhere in the data and then select Home > Tables > Format as Table. Microsoft is now rolling out the new Copilot Clean Data feature to Excel for the web users. Microsoft will roll out to Windows desktop users in the coming months.