Data cleanup in Excel: in this episode of M365.fm, Mirko Peters explains why most “analysis” jobs are really endless spreadsheet janitor work—and how Excel Copilot finally turns that cleanup into something you can delegate instead of suffer through. He walks through the everyday reality of messy CSVs, mixed date formats, rogue spaces, inconsistent labels, and columns pretending to be databases, showing how these patterns silently poison reports, Power BI dashboards, and Power Platform automations downstream.
Mirko breaks down why Excel became a chaos factory: it was built for flexibility, not governance, so it happily accepts any value in any cell, encourages ad‑hoc exports from every system, and lets copies mutate across OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and email until nobody remembers the original truth. You’ll hear war stories of mixed types, regional naming inconsistencies, and header changes that quietly break flows and joins—illustrating why manual cleanup is both unavoidable and fundamentally unsustainable once your organization starts automating on top of spreadsheets.
He then introduces Excel Copilot as an AI janitor with a PhD in pattern recognition, not just a formula helper. Mirko explains the two modes users confuse: chat mode for questions and diagnostics, and App Skills mode for actual automation that edits sheets, fixes formats, applies rules, and builds tables on your behalf. You will learn how Copilot reads the structure and semantics of your workbook via Microsoft Graph, understands entities like “revenue,” “region,” and “date,” and converts natural‑language instructions into concrete transformations that standardize formats, normalize values, and repair broken schema without you writing a single formula.
The episode also introduces three core command patterns that replace most manual cleanup: normalize everything (dates, currencies, text casing), repair structure (headers, tables, ranges), and detect anomalies (duplicates, outliers, mismatched categories). Mirko shows how these prompts let Copilot scan entire sheets, propose corrections, and preview changes so you remain the supervisor, not the typist. By the end, you’ll have a mental model and practical prompt patterns that turn Copilot into your default data janitor, freeing you to focus on analysis instead of spreadsheet penance.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
