In 2025, self-styled “Excel comedian” David Benaim FCA took his one-man show about the humble spreadsheet’s role in office life to the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Now Benaim, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), is heading to the Fringe again. With that in mind, we caught up with him to ask one, simple question: What are the top 10 best ways for accountants to use Copilot for Excel tasks?

Here, in no particular order, are Benaim’s picks of the prime prompts and other Copilot functions you can use to boost your experience of working in Excel.

1. En masse research

Benaim says this function can help with tasks such as Know Your Customer due diligence, but warns it could cause hallucinations, so checking its outputs is crucial. “Let’s say you need to do granular research on a large group of items – for example, 30 companies, 15 product lines or 60 countries. You can list them, then say to Copilot: ‘For each of these entries, give me the number of employees; last year’s reported revenue; CEOs’ names; executives’ LinkedIn profiles,’ and it will provide that information very quickly.” 

2. ‘Clean this data’ 

This is ideal for mopping up inconsistencies in selected Excel tables. Benaim explains: “If multiple cells say ‘Craig Jones,’ but one says ‘Mr Jones,’ this prompt will standardise them to one version. It will also reformat numbers stated as text and correct mistakes in data sourced from scans. So, if a cell says ‘B500,’ it will know that it's meant to say ‘8,500.’ As accountants often export data from different systems, this is a real asset.”

3. ‘Check these formulas’ and ‘Explain this workbook’ 

If you receive an Excel workbook and its formulas look odd or unfamiliar, these prompts enable you to run sense checks. “People increasingly use AI to write formulas,” Benaim says, “and the results may be either inefficient or incorrect. So, the first prompt helps accountants evaluate specific formulas, while the second expands that scrutiny out to an entire file.”

4. ‘Create documentation for this file’

When an accountant, auditor or corporate finance specialist creates an Excel file, it typically contains different elements. This prompt enables you to itemise and list those elements in one accessible place, so you can see at a glance what’s in your file. “This was really helpful when I created a file for a non-profit,” Benaim says. “It generated a list of the workbook’s tables, including the budget, staff salaries and so on, plus a list of all functions used in the file.”

5. ‘Create a dashboard’ 

Applying this prompt to an area of your Excel file will enable you to bring the data to life in a range of visual formats, such as charts and tables.

Benaim has one caveat: “At present, Copilot executes this action through formulas such as SUMIFs. However, I’d prefer it to go through PivotTables, which would auto-update with new categories.”

6. ‘Make these dates the right format’ 

Benaim points out that when accountants build spreadsheets, it is quite common for them to pull in data with US-style ‘month-day-year’ date formatting. This prompt enables you to align all your dates to the UK ‘day-month-year’ standard. You can also try ‘Make these phone numbers consistent,’ which irons out numerous formatting quirks.

7. ‘Create a financial model’ 

One good example is of an accountant wanting to devise a loan repayment schedule. “You can use this prompt to build a worksheet where you control key settings, such as the interest rate and maturity date. Essentially, a schedule will roll out with many rows in which customer repayments are calculated on the basis of those inputs.”

8. ‘Categorise this dataset’ 

This can help you manage data and keep it clear and ordered. Benaim says: “Accountants often need to classify different types of expenses, such as transportation, distribution costs or professional fees. This three-word prompt can do all that for you – but I recommend checking for hallucinations.”

9. Formulas by request

In addition to standard, prompt-based commands, you can turn to Copilot’s chat tool and ask it to write troubleshooting formulas that you can patch into your Excel file. The chat function can also provide code for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Power Query and Power Pivot’s Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). “At this time, there’s no direct Copilot user interface in Excel’s Power Query or Power Pivot windows,” Benaim notes. “But copying and pasting code out of the chat tool works just fine.”

10. Use Python to visualise data

The Python programming language has now been integrated into Excel, which Benaim says means “you can ask Copilot to harness Python to create more advanced data visualisations, or write pieces of Python code for tackling relevant problems in your file.”

Now, a last word about licensing.

Benaim explains: “At the moment, we have a choice between Copilot Premium and Copilot Basic. All users can access the chat interface, featuring the ‘Formulas by request’ function outlined above (9). The other nine functions are available under either Copilot licence, in organisations with fewer than 2000 staff. Employees in larger organisations need a Copilot Premium licence to access those facilities.”