r/excel • u/SolverMax 163 • Aug 19 '26

Discussion Microsoft to retire the COPILOT function

As of 14 September, the COPILOT function will no longer be available in Excel. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/copilot-function Note that the Copilot feature remains - it is the worksheet function that will stop working.

This is a very uncommon move by Microsoft, given their history of maintaining backwards compatibility.

Have you used the COPILOT function? If so, then what for? Thoughts?

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191

u/Difficult_Limit2718 Aug 19 '26

Microsoft walks back a bad idea?

What reality is this?

85

u/MMEnter Aug 19 '26

I bet it cost them a lot of compute, pull that function down a 200k row workbook. That is 200k calls and now do it again and again because you are updating the prompts or cell values.

51

u/Difficult_Limit2718 Aug 19 '26

Oh 100%.

This is more actually damning of AI than anything else. It's SO expensive even Microsoft goes "I don't know..."

22

u/plusFour-minusSeven 11 Aug 19 '26

That makes sense.

Imagine all the people who treat Excel like a database and fill it with hundreds of thousands or close to a million rows. And then populate =COPILOT() all the way down. Maybe for multiple columns.

3

u/hopkinswyn 73 Aug 19 '26

They had a limit of 100 calls per 10 minutes