Excel Labs is an Office Add-in for Excel that allows the Excel team to release experimental Excel features and gather customer feedback about them. Although some of these features may never be incorporated into Excel, this experimentation and feedback is vital.
Excel Labs currently includes two features:
- Advanced formula environment: An interface designed for authoring, editing, and reusing formulas.
LABS.GENERATIVEAI: A custom function that enables you to send prompts to a generative AI model and return the responses directly to the grid. This is not part of Microsoft 365 Copilot.- Excel Agent Mode: A new way to work with Excel by combining natural language with Excel’s most powerful tools. Describe what you want and Agent Mode will plan, execute, and refine the work directly in your workbook.
The Microsoft Garage is an outlet for experimental projects for you to try.
Advanced formula environment makes it easy to create, edit, and reuse formulas and named LAMBDA functions.
While Excel Name Manager lets you name and reuse any formula, including functions defined with LAMBDA, the interface makes it difficult to author these formulas. Common features that make programming easier are missing, such as immediate inline errors and syntax highlighting. Advanced formula environment fills this gap. It’s an interface for the Excel Name Manager that is designed for formula authoring. Using the advanced formula environment, you can:
- Write formulas using an editor that supports inline errors, IntelliSense, comments, and more.
- Indent formulas, making them easier to read.
- Edit modules of named formulas using a single code editor.
- Quickly reuse LAMBDA formulas by importing them from GitHub gists, or by copying them for other workbooks.
See Advanced formula environment for more information.
With the announcement of Microsoft 365 Copilot, we see great potential in the power of generative AI. LABS.GENERATIVEAI is a custom function that enables you to send prompts to a generative AI model and return the responses to the Excel grid.
Using this function, you can test the benefits of generative AI directly in Excel. LABS.GENERATIVEAI is not part of Microsoft 365 Copilot but rather a place for you to play and experiment with generative AI today within the Garage framework.
LABS.GENERATIVEAI allows you to send simple or complex prompts to a generative AI model, such as requests to:
- Analyze public information.
- Process data and define the format.
- Answer factual or creative questions.
- Produce a response based on a sample.
LABS.GENERATIVEAI allows you to reference other cells in your workbook, and it can be called inside any Excel cell or named formula in the workbook.
See LABS.GENERATIVEAI for more information.
Agent Mode brings a new way to work with Excel by combining natural language with Excel’s most powerful tools. Instead of handling every step yourself, you can describe what you want, like reshaping data, building reports, or creating dashboards, and Agent Mode will plan, execute, and refine the work directly in your workbook.
What it does:
- Handles complex, multi-step tasks such as merging sheets, generating tables, charts, and PivotTables, or applying advanced formatting.
- Uses Excel’s native features, so everything remains fully editable and refreshable.
- Iterates until results align with your intent, while you stay in control.
Best for: Scenarios that require reasoning and multiple actions, like financial modeling, data transformation, or building interactive reports.
Where: Available today in Excel for the web through the Excel Labs add-in (Frontier program). Support for additional platforms is coming soon.
Notes:
- English only for now; performance and features may evolve during preview.
- Works exclusively on the open workbook; no external data connections, web search, or enterprise search support yet.
See Agent Mode Support for more information.
Excel Labs works in Excel for Desktop, Mac, and on the web, without installing any additional software. To get started, install the add-in from the Office Store.
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.
When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party's policies.
