AI Tool of the Week: this Copilot feature can automate your monthly Excel reports

Summary

Copilot in Excel’s Skill Builder turns everyday workflows into reusable skills, helping finance teams standardize monthly reports, preserve formatting and commentary, and cut repetitive work.

The AI capability unlocked today is Copilot in Excel: Skill Builder

What problem does Skill Builder solve?

Every finance team has a monthly ritual. Actuals arrive, someone rebuilds the variance pack, reapplies the formatting, rewrites the commentary, and repeats it four weeks later. The logic lives in one analyst’s head, so the output shifts with whoever prepares it.

A skill is a saved set of instructions that tells Copilot how you want a task done: the layout, the formatting and the tone of the commentary. Call it by name and Copilot follows those instructions each time.

Until now, creating a custom skill could mean writing a SKILL.md file by hand. Skill Builder removes that step. Describe the process, share earlier prompts or examples, or finish a task once and ask Copilot to save it as a reusable skill. You can then preview and refine it before saving it to OneDrive.

How to access: Open Copilot in Excel, type @skill-builder in the chat and describe your workflow.

What can it do?

• Teach once: Turn a process you follow into a skill without writing files
• Repeat exactly: Reapply the same structure and formatting every month
• Save finished work: Convert a task you just completed into a skill in one sentence

Example

An FP&A manager must send the budget versus actuals pack to the CFO by the fifth working day, and wants next month’s version to take minutes.

What makes Skill Builder special?

• Learns from examples: It builds skills from completed work, not only instructions
• Preview first: You refine the skill before saving, and can update it later
• Open format: Skills use the standard SKILL.md format, so they stay plain, editable files

Jaspreet Bindra is co-founder and CEO, and Anuj Magazine is co-founder, of AI&Beyond.

Jaspreet Bindra