AI for Excel.
Build, comprehend, improve, and visualize spreadsheets. Yours and the ones you inherit.
- Duration 4 hours
- Audience Heavy Excel users, no coding required
- Format Live remote co-creation
- Prerequisite None (M2 recommended)
When to take this module.
- Spreadsheet load is a daily tax and AI is not helping yet.
- You inherited a critical workbook nobody understands and it is now your problem.
- Formula work, debugging, and reporting eat hours your team should be spending elsewhere.
- You want spreadsheet AI literacy that lasts beyond the next Copilot feature drop.
What the session covers.
01 Setting up AI for sustained Excel work
Custom instructions, Projects, and a dictation workflow with a clarifying-questions guardrail. Durable across the AI surfaces your IT approves.
02 Generating and building spreadsheets
Formulas from natural language: VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, cross-list comparisons, reconciliations, date arithmetic. Then a working spreadsheet built from scratch inside the session.
03 Comprehending inherited workbooks
A participant brings a workbook they inherited. The group reverse-engineers it: nested formulas, audit-grade AI checks, Excel-specific hallucination patterns. By the end, the owner can defend every cell.
04 Improving sheets
Refactor brittle formulas. Apply a 3-zone layout and named ranges. Generate cell formats, conditional formatting, and reusable styles from a prompt.
05 AI inside cells, charts, and governance
COPILOT and AI_PROMPT for text understanding at column scale. Charts and pivots as judgment plus spec, not chart-engine work. Disclosure protocol for AI output that ships externally.
What you walk away with.
- 01 A durable AI-for-Excel setup tuned to the surfaces your IT approves.
- 02 Formulas from natural language, including XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, and date arithmetic.
- 03 A reverse-engineered audit of an inherited workbook you bring to the room.
- 04 Your own spreadsheet refactored, hardened, and laid out to a 3-zone model.
Built for procurement, legal, and IT review.
AI output that ships externally carries the disclosure your customers and auditors expect. Per-participant OpenBadge 3.0 credentials plus an engagement certificate, cross-walked to EU AI Act Article 50 transparency obligations.
LiftWork does not certify compliance on your behalf. We supply structured evidence to support your legal and L&D attestation.
Questions teams ask first.
01 Do participants need a Copilot license?
No. The module is model-agnostic. Whatever AI surface your IT has approved for Excel will work.
02 Does this work on Mac and Windows?
Yes. The session covers both. Feature parity differences are flagged when they affect a specific lesson.
03 What is the inherited-workbook exercise?
One participant brings a workbook they inherited and do not fully understand. The group reverse-engineers it together. By the end, the owner can defend every formula.
04 Do we need to do M2 first?
No, but it helps. If M2 is not taken first, M3 opens with a ten-minute AI fundamentals primer.
Ready when you are.
A 30-minute call. We listen for the trigger pain, sketch the scope, and tell you whether the right shape is this module, another one, or neither.