Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Gain insight into the story of your data by asking questions and using the 'Show Insights' prompt to create dashboard-style charts.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
2.07 data-insights - Exercise.docx43.1 KB 2.07 data-insights- Exercise solution.docx
221.6 KB 02-07-Data Insights-Start.xlsx
1,000.7 KB 02-07-Data Insights-Finish.xlsx
1.1 MB 02-07-Sales Data Exercise-Start.xlsx
34 KB 02-07-Sales Data Exercise-Finish.xlsx
69.9 KB
Quick reference
Data Insights
Create an Excel dashboard-style report with data insights.
When to use
We use data insights and add all insights to the grid whenever we want to have a good starting point for an Excel dashboard.
Instructions
Show Data Insight
- Type the prompt: 'Show data insight'.
- Press Enter.
If we do not specify exactly what insight we are interested in, Copilot will analyze the data set and produce its best guess. In this case, it has returned a line chart that shows the 'Units Sold' by 'Invoice Date'.
- Click Add to a new sheet.
Add All Insights to Grid
We can create an Excel dashboard-style report by adding all insights to the grid. Copilot will create multiple Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts to represent different types of analysis based on our dataset.
- Type the prompt: 'Add all insights to grid'.
- Press Enter.
More Insights
We can gain more insight by asking our data questions and getting Copilot to find the answer.
- Type the prompt: 'Which retailer has the highest total sales?'.
- Press Enter.
- 00:04 Copilot allows us to get quick insights into our data and
- 00:08 also interrogate our data by asking questions.
- 00:12 Now, you can see over in my prompt area, just above,
- 00:15 I have a suggested prompt called Show data insights.
- 00:18 So I could type that in if I haven't got it as a suggested prompt,
- 00:22 I'm going to click it because I have it sitting right there.
- 00:25 Now, what this is going to do is it's going to look at my data set and
- 00:29 it's going to produce some kind of insight into my data,
- 00:32 that might be in the form of a PivotTable or a PivotChart.
- 00:36 So let's see what it comes up with based off of my data set.
- 00:39 Because I haven't given it any specific prompt as to the kind of
- 00:44 information I'm trying to extract.
- 00:46 So here we go, It's created a line chart.
- 00:50 It gives me a little bit of information about the insight that it's found.
- 00:53 And I can see here, we have a line chart,
- 00:56 units sold by invoice date, which is pretty nice.
- 00:59 It might be something that I want to see.
- 01:01 But the thing that I like most about data insights is,
- 01:04 if you take a look just underneath, we have two suggested prompts.
- 01:07 Can I see another insight and add all insights to grid?
- 01:11 Now, if we click Add all insights to grid, that's going to create lots and
- 01:16 lots of different data insights.
- 01:18 So we're going to get quite a few PivotCharts and
- 01:21 the corresponding PivotTables.
- 01:22 So you can see here, this is sort of built like a mini Excel dashboard, and
- 01:27 we can see our data chopped up and analyzed in lots of different ways.
- 01:31 And underneath, we have all of the corresponding PivotTables for
- 01:35 those PivotCharts.
- 01:36 So if we think to ourselves, actually, some of these aren't displaying exactly as
- 01:40 I want them to display, it's very easy for us to go in to the Design tab,
- 01:45 the Format tab, apply styles, change the way that we're viewing that data.
- 01:49 But it gives us a really nice base to start from.
- 01:52 Now, you can also gain more insight by asking your data questions.
- 01:57 So maybe I just really quickly want to know,
- 02:01 which retailer has the highest total sales?
- 02:04 I can send that through and Copilot should be able to look at my data and
- 02:08 produce that result.
- 02:10 And the ability to ask your data questions means that you don't have to go into your
- 02:14 data and start performing some IFS calculations and
- 02:17 things like that to get to your answer.
- 02:20 You can simply ask Copilot, it will work it out for you and
- 02:23 produce the result in the pane.
- 02:24 So there we go, I can see that Westgear is the retailer that has
- 02:29 the highest amount of total sales.
- 02:32 So if my boss came to me and just wanted to know that information, it's very
- 02:36 quick for me to pull that out without actually having to do any calculations.
- 02:40 I can choose this stage to add this as a PivotTable or
- 02:43 I could just simply copy and paste this information into an email and
- 02:46 send it through to whoever was interested in knowing this total.
- 02:50 Notice underneath, again, we have some suggested prompts, and these are always in
- 02:54 the context of the prompts that we've sent through previously.
- 02:57 So a couple of really great methods there for quickly building an Excel dashboard,
- 03:01 and also getting fast answers to questions.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.