Business Data Analysis with Copilot in Excel & PivotTables

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

If you want to learn how to analyze your data using nothing more than plain English, this course is the one you're looking for. Microsoft Excel Copilot puts an AI data analyst right inside the spreadsheet you already use, and this course shows you exactly how to put it to work. Recorded in high definition video, it teaches you practical skills you can apply in your work environment immediately. Just take a look at the recent comments and reviews!

COURSE CONTENT AND OUTCOMES

This course teaches you how to use Excel Copilot to turn your data into new insight and intelligence, simply by asking questions of it.

The ability to ask questions of your data is a powerful competitive advantage, resulting in new income streams, better decision making and improved productivity. Copilot removes the barrier between you and your answers. Instead of building analysis by hand, you describe what you want to know and Copilot does the heavy lifting, generating the tables, charts and summaries for you in seconds.

During the course you will learn how to write effective Copilot prompts, how to interpret what Copilot gives you back, and how to check its results so you can trust the insight you share. You will understand why each form of analysis matters and see it produced live using Copilot.

Using Excel Copilot, you will learn to produce:

• Key Metrics

• Comparison Analysis

• Trend Analysis

• Ranking Analysis

• Interactive Dashboards

• Contribution Analysis

• Variance Analysis

• Pareto Analysis

• Frequency Analysis

• Correlations

For each one you will learn the plain-English prompts that get Copilot to do the work, so you can reproduce the same analysis on your own data straight away.

TWO COURSES IN ONE

As well as the new Excel Copilot material, this course includes the original PivotTables course as a second part. There you will see how to create the very same types of analysis using PivotTables, the traditional way. This gives you the best of both worlds. You learn the fast, prompt-driven Copilot approach, and you also understand what is happening underneath so you can work confidently whether or not Copilot is available to you.

This course is designed for all business professionals who want to take their ability to turn data into information to the next level. If you are an Excel user then you will want to learn the easy, prompt-driven techniques that are taught in this course.

WHAT YOU NEED TO FOLLOW ALONG

The Copilot part of the course requires a Microsoft 365 subscription with Copilot enabled on your account, and it is presented using Excel Copilot in Microsoft 365.

The PivotTables part of the course uses techniques that work in Excel 2016 and every version since, including Excel 2019, Excel 2021, Excel 2024 and Excel in Microsoft 365.

HOW YOU WILL LEARN IT

This is not a course you watch. Every analysis is followed by a written activity brief and the training data to do it on, then a video where I work through the answer with you. There are 26 written lessons and activity briefs in the course, and 42 downloadable data files. Part 2 also includes Udemy's AI role-play exercises: eleven simulated project meetings where you talk each analysis through with Ada, a colleague on a live sales project, and have to explain your own reasoning back.

WHO IS TEACHING YOU

I have been training business people to work with data since 2008, and publishing on Udemy since 2013. Across 16 courses that training has reached more than 400,000 students and 139,000 reviews, at an average of 4.6. This is the course I keep closest to current - it was last updated in July 2026.

START TODAY

By the end of this course you will be able to open a spreadsheet you have never seen before, ask it the right questions in plain English, and have a dashboard your manager can act on - in minutes, not an afternoon. And you will know how to build the same thing by hand when you need to. Enrol now and start with your first analysis today.

Please note that this course does not require any complicated formulas, VBA or macros. In the Copilot part you get Copilot to create the majority of the different data analysis techniques for you simply by asking, and in the PivotTables part you use straightforward drag and drop techniques.