Microsoft Excel

Excel Copilot: Conditional Formatting Suggestions That Actually Understand Your Data

Chris Menard

14 Feb 2025 — 3 min read

Excel's Copilot now suggests conditional formatting rules based on your data. Instead of manually writing formatting rules, Copilot analyzes your dataset and offers one-click suggestions — like highlighting dates in a specific year or cells matching certain text.

How It Works

Open a spreadsheet with data, click in the data range, and open the Copilot panel. Copilot automatically detects your data structure and suggests relevant conditional formatting rules. In this example, the dataset contains dates, locations, and countries — Copilot offers suggestions tailored to those column types.

Excel spreadsheet with Date, Location, and Country columns showing international travel data from 2023-2024 — The source data with dates, locations, and countries that Copilot analyzes for formatting suggestions

Copilot's Suggestions

Copilot offers context-aware suggestions like:

Highlight duplicate cells in column 'Location'
Highlight dates in the year 2023 in column 'Date'
Highlight dates after 7/1/2023 in column 'Date'
Highlight dates equal to 6/28/2024 in column 'Date'
Highlight cells equal to 'South Africa' in column 'Country'

Copilot panel showing conditional formatting suggestions including highlight duplicates, dates in 2023, and cells equal to South Africa — Copilot suggests formatting rules based on the actual data in your columns

Click any suggestion and Copilot shows you the formula it will use (like =YEAR($A2) = 2023), the formatting style, and an Apply button. You can preview the result before committing.

Copilot showing the formula YEAR A2 equals 2023 with Apply button and working on highlighting South Africa cells — Copilot shows the formula and lets you apply the formatting with one click

Works with Tables Too

Copilot's conditional formatting suggestions also work when your data is formatted as an Excel Table (Ctrl+T). The suggestions adapt to the table structure and column names.

Key Points

Suggestions are context-aware — Copilot reads your column types and data values to offer relevant rules
You can apply multiple rules — Click several suggestions to layer formatting
The formula is visible — You can see exactly what Copilot will apply before clicking
Works with both ranges and tables
Check out more ways to use Copilot for advanced conditional formatting