Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available in Excel for the web, bringing a much more powerful, “agentic” Copilot experience that can plan, execute, and verify multi‑step workflows directly inside your workbook. This rollout targets commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers first, with broader consumer availability and desktop support coming in early 2026.
Agent Mode in Excel moves from preview to prime time
In a new Excel blog post, Microsoft confirms that Agent Mode in Excel is now generally available for Excel on the web, graduating from the Frontier early access phase into a mainstream feature for business users. The company says the rollout is targeted at customers with a commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot license or a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription, with Agent Mode turned on directly inside the Excel web experience.
Microsoft frames this launch as a major shift in how people work with Copilot in Excel, moving from one‑off, chat‑style responses to an agentic model where AI can orchestrate multi‑step tasks, verify results, and keep working until the outcome matches user intent. This aligns with Microsoft’s broader “Agent Mode and Office Agent” vision across Microsoft 365, where AI moves from simple helpers to delegated digital coworkers embedded in the apps you already use.
From single prompts to multi-step workflows
The standout change with Agent Mode is how it handles complex tasks: instead of just answering one question at a time, it can break a request into multiple steps, plan a workflow, and execute it directly in your workbook. After you type a prompt, Agent Mode analyzes what you are asking, generates a step‑by‑step plan, and then runs those steps in sequence while keeping you in the loop.
This means you can ask Agent Mode to clean data, restructure tables, build a financial model, or generate new dashboards, and it will orchestrate everything with tables, formulas, PivotTables, and charts inside Excel rather than just giving you suggestions to copy and paste. For anyone used to going back and forth with Copilot or manually wiring together multiple features, Agent Mode’s multi‑step reasoning effectively turns Copilot into an AI analyst that can carry out end‑to‑end workflows.
Direct workbook manipulation, no copy and paste
Microsoft emphasizes that Agent Mode does its work directly inside your Excel workbook, using native Excel features so everything remains editable, recalculating, and consistent with your existing data. When Agent Mode formats ranges, adds formulas, inserts PivotTables, or generates charts, these are “real” Excel objects—not screenshots or static output—so they continue to update as your data changes.
Access is also built into the existing Copilot experience: in Excel for the web, you open Copilot chat, head to the Tools menu, and select Agent Mode to switch into this deeper automation mode. Once enabled, the agent operates over the currently open workbook, using your data as the primary grounding source and applying all changes in place, with the option for you to review, refine, or revert as needed.
Transparency, reasoning, and verification
A key design pillar for Agent Mode is transparency—Microsoft wants users to see what the AI is planning before it touches any data. When you submit a request, Agent Mode first displays a clear plan that breaks down what it intends to do, such as cleaning columns, creating a summary table, and building charts, and you can edit or approve that plan before it runs.
As the agent works, you can watch its reasoning in the Copilot pane, see each step get executed, and review explanations for the outputs it generated. Agent Mode also includes verification and validation loops—if the outcome does not match your intent, you can quickly ask it to adjust assumptions, fix formulas, or refine a specific step, rather than starting over from scratch.
What you can do with Agent Mode today
With general availability on Excel for the web, Agent Mode unlocks several practical scenarios that go beyond what traditional chatbots or basic Copilot prompts can handle. Microsoft highlights a few core use cases that Excel users can try right away:
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Create new workbooks: Agent Mode can generate new worksheets or complete workbooks based on your prompts, using both existing workbook data and, when needed, live web search to pull in relevant context like market metrics, benchmarks, or reference data.
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Scenario modeling: You can ask Agent Mode to run what‑if analyses on revenue, budgets, or forecasts by adjusting assumptions, comparing scenarios, and summarizing the impact in tables and charts.
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Data analysis at scale: Agent Mode can scan large datasets, highlight trends, surface anomalies, and build formula‑driven summaries that you can inspect and modify like any other Excel model.
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Formula generation and fixing: If a workbook is full of broken or inconsistent formulas, you can ask Agent Mode to repair them, standardize calculations, or create new dynamic formulas—complete with explanations so you can understand how the logic works.
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Data visualization and dashboards: Through natural language prompts, Agent Mode can create PivotTables, charts, and interactive dashboards that continue to recalc as the underlying data changes, giving you a living view of your KPIs and trends.
These are the kinds of workflows that previously required a mix of manual work, VBA, complex formulas, or external help; now, Agent Mode aims to make them accessible to anyone comfortable typing a request in plain language.
Where Agent Mode is available and what’s next
At launch, Agent Mode in Excel is fully supported in Excel for the web for users with a commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot license or a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription, with the feature rolling out worldwide throughout December 2025 and into early 2026. Microsoft’s rollout plan notes that some regions and tenants may see the feature appear later in the window as capacity ramps up.
Microsoft also confirms that Agent Mode will expand beyond the web: support for Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac is planned for January, with the Windows version already available to some Insiders as “Agent Mode (Frontier).” In addition, Agent Mode will extend to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers in January, helping bring the feature to prosumers and home users who want the same AI workflows for personal finance, side projects, or education.
Language support, web grounding, and future context features
Out of the gate, Agent Mode supports a wide range of languages, including English (US), Spanish (Spain and Mexico), Japanese, French (France and Canada), German, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, and Simplified Chinese, with more languages planned over time. This broad localization makes Agent Mode immediately useful for multinational teams and organizations working across multiple regions.
In terms of intelligence, Agent Mode uses the latest OpenAI reasoning models that power Microsoft 365 Copilot, and it can ground its outputs in web data when a task needs up‑to‑date information. Microsoft is also planning to light up file grounding and Work IQ support for Excel in early 2026, which will allow Agent Mode to automatically pull in relevant context from your organization’s documents, emails, and meetings when available—similar to how Office Agent operates in other Microsoft 365 apps.
Why this is a big deal for Excel power users
For analysts, finance teams, and operations leaders who live in Excel, Agent Mode represents a significant step beyond traditional assistive AI. Instead of repeatedly asking Copilot for incremental help—“write this formula”, “build that chart”—you can delegate an entire workflow and then iterate on the result as if you were collaborating with a human colleague.
Early guidance from Microsoft and community experts describes Agent Mode as a kind of AI intern or hands‑on analyst that works inside your file, explains what it’s doing, and keeps you in control of every change. That combination of deeper automation, transparency, and direct workbook manipulation is what makes this general availability milestone stand out from previous Copilot upgrades in Excel.
How to get started with Agent Mode in Excel
If you have an eligible license, getting started with Agent Mode in Excel is straightforward on the web.
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Open Excel for the web (you can use the excel.new shortcut to spin up a new workbook quickly).
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Select the Copilot icon on the Home tab to open Copilot chat.
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Open the Tools menu in the Copilot pane and choose Agent Mode to enable the new experience.
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Type a natural language request—such as asking to clean a dataset, build a model, or generate a dashboard—and review the step‑by‑step plan Agent Mode proposes before approving it.
Microsoft also provides a dedicated support article and FAQ that walk through how Agent Mode works, what to expect during rollout, and how it differs from standard Copilot assistance in Excel. For organizations standardizing on Microsoft 365 Copilot, this general availability moment turns Excel into one of the most advanced AI‑driven tools in the Microsoft 365 lineup—right in the browser, no extra setup required.
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