Create Copliot to ask questions about data

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Posted on by Siva Mani

Dear Commnuity,

I am exploring Copilot Studio capabilities. I wanted to create a Copilot to ask questions about data (in Excel or CSV) such as Revenue by month, a month with highest sales, or top N products by revenue. I tried with uploading the file and create it. But it doesn't seem working as expected. Is copilot there yet to answer such questions? if not, what are my other alternates - I have the same data in dataverse?

Thanks in advance!

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ronaldwalcott 3,847 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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It should work. I tried something similar in Power Apps using the Copilot Answer control and found it depends on how you phrase your prompts.

What results are you seeing and how are you phrasing your queries?

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Siva Mani 6 on at

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ronaldwalcott

The output is generated based on only 10 to 20 rows, primarily from the top of the dataset. When I hover over the reference, it contains around 2,300 to 2,500 characters, even though I specifically requested a summary of all records.

For example, when I asked for the overall sales for December 2021, I received an incorrect number because it only considered the top 10 to 20 rows.

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WF-19092047-0 6 on at

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More information would be helpful ... but a couple suggestions ...

When you say you "tried uploading the file" what exactly did you do? I think the best approach is to stay simple. I recommend creating a Knowledge source that just has the file (or files) you want to query and nothing else.

Also, go into Test mode and open the Activity Map. It can help you see what Knowledge sources Copilot is using

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Vinoth Selvam 1,590 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi Siva Mani ,

Copilot is getting improved each day and i feel Microsoft will surely make them work more efficiently. For this kind of error, i have been using some workarounds to provide better response.

But for the Aggregate, i dont think still it can work as expected. In this case, we can either have a seperate table or sheet that holds the aggregate values like Revenue for this month . highest sales etc. We need to perform some calculations inside the Excel source instead of expecting the Copilot to calculate.

For Dataverse:

More than using the knowledge source directly here, we tried using Custom Prompt with AI builder and connect to dataverse tables. By which we will be able to modify the responses to a larger extent.

I have created the below Post that you can refer .

https://msdcentral.site/co-pilot-studio-how-to-use-ai-builder-integrate-with-dataverse-in-co-pilot/

https://community.powerplatform.com/blogs/post/?postid=4dcb4681-1985-ef11-ac20-7c1e5246e2b5

For Structured Excel:

I have created the below Post that you can refer .

https://msdcentral.site/copilot-studio-using-structured-data-in-excel-as-sharepoint-knowledge-source/

https://community.powerplatform.com/blogs/post/?postid=1578c2d5-4385-ef11-ac21-6045bda6da2f

Kindly try this approach and provide your suggestions on how it works.

Thanks.

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