If you use Excel regularly, the hard part usually isn’t the math. It’s getting the output to look the way it’s supposed to. Currency in the right format. Headings the way your reports always look. The naming convention your team’s used for years. None of that is hard, exactly. It’s just repetitive, and you end up saying the same thing to Copilot every single time.
Microsoft just fixed that, building on Copilot Memory. As of June 2026, Copilot in Excel can learn your formatting preferences, naming conventions, and report styles once, and apply them automatically after that. Tell it how you want currency displayed or how a report should be structured, and it remembers. You stop re-explaining yourself every session.
The part that matters more for a team
The more useful piece is what Microsoft calls workbook rules. Instead of preferences living in your own Copilot settings, the rules can live inside the spreadsheet itself, in a sheet Microsoft calls .Rules. When you share that workbook, the rules travel with it.
That solves a familiar problem. One person builds a report a certain way, somebody else builds the same report differently, and within a few months there are three versions of what was supposed to be one standard document. Workbook rules let you point Copilot at a good example, define how a formula should work, or have it read an entire sheet and figure out the pattern on its own. Everyone working in that file gets the same standard, without you having to explain it to each new hire.
To set it up, open Copilot in Excel, click the plus sign, and select “Create workbook rules.” If a .Rules sheet already exists, you can just add to it, one rule per line in column A.
This is a real step, not just a bigger chatbot
Up to now, most of what Copilot did in Excel was answer questions, generate a chart, explain a formula. This is different. It’s Copilot learning how your business actually does things, instead of you constantly re-teaching it. That’s a meaningful shift, and it’s the kind of update that quietly saves real time once it’s in place.
It doesn’t remove the need to check the work. Spreadsheets carry real business decisions, and any AI-touched output, a formula, a total, a formatted report, still needs a human look before it goes out the door. That’s true whether Copilot wrote it from scratch or just applied a rule you set months ago.
Worth setting up this week
Personalization is already available to Copilot in Excel users on web, Mac, and Windows. Workbook rules are still rolling out to a subset of users, so you may not see the option yet. If you’ve got a report your team rebuilds the same way every month, this is worth setting up the moment it’s available to you. If you want help figuring out where Copilot actually saves your team time versus where it just adds a new step to check, we can help through our Microsoft 365 management service.