Copilot Just Became the Most Useful Thing in Excel

You open a shared Excel workbook that your team has been editing for weeks. You have no idea what changed, who changed it, or whether some of those changes were made by a colleague or by Copilot. August 2026 gives Copilot the ability to answer all three questions in plain English, take you back to any previous state, and design your charts while it is at it.

September 7, 2026

Microsoft Excel

Introduction

August 2026 is an entirely Copilot-focused Excel release. All three generally available updates of the month extend what Copilot can do inside shared workbooks and how it handles visual design.

Copilot Can Now Review Your Workbook's Full Change History

You return to a workbook after a week away. Your team has made dozens of edits. Some were manual. Some were Copilot-generated. Finding out what actually changed used to mean scrolling through Show Changes one entry at a time.

The new change history skill lets you ask Copilot directly. It summarises recent edits across the entire workbook, narrows down to a specific sheet, range, or cell on request, and tells you who made each change, including distinguishing between human edits and Copilot edits. Excel tracks supported changes for up to 365 days.

Some prompts that work immediately:

- "Catch me up on the changes to this workbook."

- "Summaries the changes made in the past seven days".

- "Who changed the values on the Forecast sheet and what did they change?"

- "What changes has Copilot made to this workbook?"

Beyond summarizing, Copilot can also help undo specific edits or restore a formula by returning the workbook to a previous working state without going into Version History manually.

If you read our earlier blog on Show Changes, which covered how Copilot edits started getting labelled with a visual flag, this month's update is the natural next step. That update made Copilot edits visible. This one lets Copilot explain and reverse them.

Availability: Excel for Windows, Mac, and web. Requires changes to be available in the workbook's change history.

Copilot Can Now Review Your Workbook's Full Change History

Until now every Excel session started with a blank Copilot pane. If you used Copilot across multiple sessions to build formula logic, set up calculations, or analyse a dataset, that context disappeared when you closed the file.

Chat history changes that. Use the menu icon in the upper left corner of the Copilot pane to access all your previous Copilot conversations in Excel. Conversations are listed by recency with the most recent at the top. Select any conversation to view it and continue from where you left off.

One practical note: deleting individual conversations is not yet available. To clear your full Copilot history, follow the steps to delete Microsoft Copilot activity history from your account settings.

Availability: Rolling out for commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions. Not available on consumer plans.

Copilot Can Now Design and Improve Your Charts

The third update this month introduces the @chart-design skill, which lets Copilot create new charts from raw data or improve existing ones. It can add chart titles, axis titles, legends, data labels, and other visual elements, and recommends new chart types based on your data.

To use it, type @chart-design in your Copilot prompt. For example: "@chart-design create a chart from this sales data" or "@chart-design improve this chart."

One thing to note before trying it: chart-design is disabled by default. Open the Manage skills dialog in Copilot and enable it from the Visualisation folder first.

If you used the @theme-design skill from last month, chart-design is its natural companion. Theme-design applies a coordinated look across the whole workbook. Chart-design handles individual chart creation and polish.

Availability: Excel for Windows, Mac, and web.

Conclusion

August 2026 deepens Copilot's role in shared workbook environments. Between change history, chat history, and chart design, Copilot in Excel is becoming more than a prompt-and-respond assistant. It is starting to understand how your workbook got to where it is, remember the work it has already done with you, and take on visual design work that used to require manual effort.

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🔖Tags: Chart Design, Copilot, Excel, Excel blogs, Excel for windows