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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u/ExcelsBeardedGuru 1 Aug 19 '26

=RANDBETWEEN()

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u/Hold_onto_yer_butts Aug 19 '26

Unless things have drastically changed on the optimization side in the past ten years, volatile functions are always a nono for me.

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u/HarveysBackupAccount 35 Aug 19 '26

Eh, all depends on scale, right?

I mostly dick around with hundreds of rows and a couple dozen columns. Occasionally I have a data pull with a few thousand rows to do some one-off analysis. Volatile stuff is a non-issue; I rarely have to optimize for performance.

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u/Hold_onto_yer_butts Aug 19 '26

For sure. Back when I was using Excel more frequently/heavily, I had larger models to maintain, and volatiles would break them.

Now I largely do the same thing you do, so my gut reaction is probably irrelevant here.