Excel vs AI

Microsoft Excel is the original low-code tool, but data and business logic in an Excel spreadsheet are not managed and not necessarily shared with other business users, so they are not something that can be easily reused outside that spreadsheet. Data in the data platform used by Microsoft’s Power Platform, Dataverse, is richer: There’s metadata that tags business objects like email addresses, invoices and order numbers with details of what should be in them and what business do with them, plus support for business logic, authorization, intelligence and analytics.

The generative AI Power Apps Copilot can already be used to build applications in Microsoft Dataverse by describing in natural language what a user wants the app to do. For example, they can ask Copilot to add more screens, controls and features as they get more ideas.

Excel to App is a new tool in preview to help users bring in data they already have in spreadsheets. It does exactly what the name suggests: Users can drag and drop unstructured data from Excel — or give Copilot a link to the file — and the Power Platform will analyze it, enrich it with the extra information Dataverse needs, and turn it into an app, Nirav Shah, the vice president of Dataverse at Microsoft, explained to TechRepublic ahead of the Microsoft Build event. At the Build developer conference, Microsoft is announcing a range of new AI tools and services.

“Because it’s Power Apps Copilot-enabled, it’s inferring what the table structure should be, how should it name it, what are the descriptions, what are the columns that need to exist and the data types of those columns,” Shah said. “For enumerations (which are lists of possible values), it even automatically generates the values for the option set in the Dataverse schema for you.”

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