Copilot is so good at manipulating data

One of the less known capabilities in Copilot is the ability to transform text in lists. I recently had to transform a list of companies from one format to another. It’s one of those things that I used to do with Word or Excel, like sorting, removing a number from the beginning of a line or changing the case of a text.

Recently I had to take a list of companies and turn into a comma-separated list. I was already planning to do this in a few steps using Word when it occurred to me that Copilot could do whole the thing in one prompt. Here’s how well it did:

My prompt:

Take this list of companies, switch to proper case, sort in alphabetical order and turn into a comma-separated list.

1. AMAZON
2. APPLE
3. BROADCOM
4. CISCO
5. DELL
6. GOOGLE
7. INTEL
8. MICROSOFT
9. FACEBOOK
10. NVIDIA
11. QUALCOMM
12. SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS
13. TWITTER
14. FOXCONN
15. SONY
16. HITACHI
17. IBM
18. TENCENT
19. PANASONIC
20. LENOVO
21. HP INC.
22. LG ELECTRONICS

Copilot’s response:

Here is the list of companies in proper case, sorted in alphabetical order, and turned into a comma-separated list:

Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Foxconn, Google, Hitachi, HP Inc., IBM, Intel, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nvidia, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Tencent, Twitter

That was it. Perfect output and exactly what I needed to paste into a slide. It removed the numbers, switched to proper case (even handling IBM, HP and LG correctly), sorted everything and switched to a comma-separated list. All in one pass.

That was not the actual company list I was working on (not going to publish that in blog). I got the list above just by asking copilot for a list of top tech companies for this example. But the transformation was exactly what I was looking for.

I then got interested in doing even more with this list.

My prompt:

Add revenue and number of employees to the list. Format it as a table.

Copilot’s response:

Certainly! Below is the comprehensive list of companies, along with their revenue and number of employees, presented in a table format:

Once again, I’m impressed. It even gave me a little link to get this data in Excel format. I tried that but some of the numbers did not work in excel because they had the word “million”. I fixed by asking Copilot like this:

In the employee column, use only numbers, avoiding the word million.

Perfect. Now Excel had no problems taking this in. After some format adjustments (which the Excel Copilot could help with):

Impressive. Next time you need to do some data manipulation, try asking it to Copilot.