I posted about my first impressions of Microsoft Copilot in Excel about three weeks ago. I exhausted the credits available for the standard home package in a week! So, I paid AUD 329 for the "Premium" tier. I am using it for two main things. As discussed in that post, I am debugging monthly accounts. The second use is building monthly spreadsheets from transaction level data. This is a huge time-saver.
A few years ago, I set up a spreadsheet that consolidated all the individual transactions from our bank and brokerage accounts into monthly closing values and various monthly aggregates: Investment income, non-investment income (salaries, taxes etc.), and transfers. But the workbook only covered some mostly recent months. It seemed like a project that might never get completed. The value of the workbook (dubbed Ledger) is that it makes compiling bug-free monthly accounts much easier and quicker. You can just copy last month's accounts and move all cell locations one cell forward.
Copilot means that this project now might be completed–for all 30 years of data–relatively quickly. You can just ask it to fill the monthly cells in Ledger with various calculations on the individual transactions for that month from the relevant Excel workbook. By hand, you would need to adjust the range of cells to capture the relevant transactions individually for each month. So far, I have worked on the easier cases and will complete those first. Not all transactions spreadsheets are as nicely formatted as I would like.
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