Insights in Excel: Get automated, fast, accurate analysis of your data

What if I told you in Excel 2016 for Office 365, you can click on one cell and with two more clicks, have data analysis you would never dream of having? It’s here! Microsoft has updated Excel 2016 for Office 365 with Insights for Excel. Insight is discussed in the December 13, 2017, blog post from Microsoft. I’ve been waiting to get this since then and I received the update on Saturday, March 3, 2018. I spent two days testing Insights. It is incredible!

Insights relies on machine learning to help seek out patterns. In my test, it identified outliers, and quickly gave me other useful visualizations. It even took some of my data and automatically created a PivotTable and PivotChart. I simply clicked on Insights.

Steps to see Insights in Excel:

1. Simply click a cell in a data range 2. Click the Insights button on the Insert tab. 3. Insight Services will analyze your data and return interesting visuals about it in a task pane on the right-hand side of your screen.

Menard tip: Make your data range a table first using CTRL + T. My free course on Ten reasons to use Tables in Excel.

Video On using Insights in Excel

Insights in Excel - Data Analysis game changer by Chris Menard - YouTube

The video above shows three test in Excel and one error message during the testing.

To use Insights you need the following:

1. Internet Connection 2. Enough Data for Insights to Work. If you click Insights, you may get this message “We couldn’t find any significant patterns in your data to show as an Insight. Try using a larger dataset with more variation in it.” See the photo gallery above. From my three test, this is due to not enough columns. I had plenty of records. In fact, in the Video below you can see I had 576 records. I had to add some column data.