How to Create a Summary Report in Excel with AI

Creating a summary report in Excel used to mean blocking off half your day for a marathon of VLOOKUPs, PivotTables, and chart formatting. Thankfully, AI is turning that marathon into a quick sprint. This article shows you how to use Excel’s new AI features to generate insightful summary reports in minutes just by asking for what you need in plain English.

What is a Summary Report, Really?

A summary report is a high-level overview of a large dataset that helps you understand performance at a glance. Instead of looking at thousands of individual sales transactions, a summary report shows you the highlights: total sales per region, top-performing products, or sales trends over time. Its goal is to turn raw data into clear, actionable information so you can make smarter decisions without getting lost in the weeds.

For example, a marketing team might use a summary report to track:

Website traffic by source
Conversion rates for different campaigns
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) on various ad platforms

A sales team might summarize:

Deals closed per salesperson
Revenue by product category
Sales pipeline velocity

Whatever the metrics, the purpose is the same: distill complexity into clarity.

The Old Way: Building Manual Summaries in Excel

Before AI, creating a summary report was a manual, multi-step process. If you’ve ever had to build a weekly or monthly report, this probably sounds painfully familiar.

The typical workflow looked something like this:

Gathering Data: Downloading multiple CSV files from different platforms - Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads - and copying it all into separate Excel sheets.
Cleaning Data: This is the tedious part. It involves removing extra spaces, correcting typos, making date formats consistent, and deleting blank rows. A single mistake could throw off the entire report.
Summarizing with Formulas and PivotTables: This is where the real "Excel magic" happened. You’d use formulas like SUMIF, COUNTIF, or VLOOKUP to aggregate data from different tables.

A simple formula might look like this:

=SUMIF(A2:A100,"North", B2:B100)

(This one adds up all sales in column B for the "North" region listed in column A.)

For more complex summaries, you'd turn to PivotTables. While incredibly powerful, they come with a steep learning curve. You’d have to drag and drop fields into the correct rows, columns, and value areas, and then experiment with filters to get the exact summary you needed.

Finally, after all that work, you’d create charts to visualize the findings, format them to match your company's branding, and copy them into a presentation. The whole process could take hours, was prone to human error, and had to be repeated every single time you needed an updated report.

The New Way: Creating Reports with AI in Excel

Modern Excel has built-in AI tools that automate most of that manual work. Instead of piecing together formulas, you can now simply tell Excel what you want to see. The two key features powering this are Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Analyze Data.

Using Copilot in Excel

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a true AI assistant embedded directly within Excel. To use it effectively, your raw data needs to be formatted as an official Excel Table. This gives your data structure, so Copilot can easily understand the rows and columns.To format your data as a table, just click any cell within your dataset, go to the Insert tab, and click Table. Excel will automatically detect your data range.

Once your data is in a Table, you can click the Copilot button on the Home tab and a chat pane will appear on the right. From there, you just ask questions in natural language.

You can ask it to:

Summarize data: "Show total revenue by product category" or "Breakdown sales by region and show the top 3."
Generate insights: "What are the biggest drivers of our sales increase last month?" or "Identify any unusual trends in user signups."
Create formulas: "Add a new column that calculates the profit margin using the Revenue and COGS columns."
Build charts instantly: "Generate a line chart illustrating sales trends for the last 6 months."

Copilot takes your request, analyzes your data table, and generates the summary table, formula, or chart for you in seconds.

Using the Analyze Data Feature

If you don’t have a Copilot subscription, you can still use Excel’s other powerful AI feature: Analyze Data (previously known as Ideas). It functions in a similar way, automatically generating insights, summary charts, and PivotTables from your data.

To use it, select a cell in your data range, navigate to the Home tab, and click Analyze Data on the right side of the ribbon. A pane will appear with suggested charts and PivotTables that summarize your data in interesting ways. You can click 'Insert' on any of these suggestions to add them to your spreadsheet.

Even better, at the top of the Analyze Data pane, there’s a search bar where you can ask specific questions, just like with Copilot. For instance, you could type "total sales by salesperson" and it will generate the perfect PivotTable on the spot.

Step-by-Step Guide: Your First AI-Powered Sales Summary Report

Let's walk through creating a sales summary report with AI. Imagine you have a spreadsheet with sales data containing these columns: OrderDate, Region, SalesRep, ProductType, UnitsSold, and Revenue.

Step 1: Format Your Data as an Excel Table

First things first. Click any cell within your data, go to the Insert tab, and click Table. Press OK. Your data will now have color banding and filter arrows on each header. This simple step is critical for Excel's AI to understand your data set properly.

Step 2: Generate Key Summaries with Copilot or Analyze Data

Open the Copilot pane (or Analyze Data). Let’s start with a broad request to get our main KPIs.

Type this prompt:

"Create a summary table showing total Revenue and the total number of Units Sold, grouped by Region."

Copilot will instantly create a new PivotTable summarizing that exact information. It saves you the hassle of setting one up manually.

Step 3: Ask Follow-up Questions to Drill Deeper

Now that you have your regional summary, you probably have more questions. This is where the conversational nature of AI shines. You can build on your previous query.

Let's find out who the top performers are. Try this prompt:

"Create a bar chart comparing the top 5 sales reps by total revenue."

AI will analyze your data and produce a perfectly formatted chart showing you a leaderboard of your top reps. You didn’t need to sort the data, build a table, or fiddle with chart settings.

Step 4: Identify Trends and Insights

Summaries are not just about totals, they’re also about understanding trends. Let’s see how sales have progressed over time.

Use this prompt:

"Show me a line chart of monthly revenue trend for this year."

The AI will read the OrderDate and Revenue columns and generate a line chart that visualizes monthly performance. You can quickly spot good months, bad months, and overall growth patterns.

Step 5: Assemble Your Report Dashboard

After generating several key summary tables and charts, create a new worksheet in your workbook and name it "Report Dashboard." Copy and paste your AI-generated visuals onto this sheet. Now you have a clean, one-page summary report that you can easily share with your team or management.

Tips for Getting Better Results from Excel's AI

While an AI assistant is powerful, giving it good instructions and clean data will make its output higher quality. Here are a few best practices:

Keep Your Data Clean: The classic rule "garbage in, garbage out" still applies. AI can handle some messiness, but it works best with structured data. Make sure each column has a clear header and the data formats are consistent.
Be Specific With Your Prompts: A vague prompt like "show sales" might give you a simple total. A specific prompt like "Show me Q4 sales revenue by product type in the West region, sorted highest to lowest" will give you a much more useful result. Start broad and then narrow down your requests.
Double-Check the Output: AI is a fantastic assistant, but it’s not infallible. Always give its output a quick gut check. Does the summary make sense? Do the numbers look right based on what you know about the business? Use it to do the heavy lifting, but keep a human eye on the final result.

Final Thoughts

Creating summary reports in Excel no longer has to be a weekly chore spent wrestling with formulas. Thanks to built-in AI like Copilot and Analyze Data, it's become a dynamic, conversational process. You can explore your data, ask questions, and get instant answers, giving you more time to focus on what the numbers mean and less time just figuring out how to get them.

For many teams, the reporting challenge goes beyond a single spreadsheet. Your data is often spread across a dozen other tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce. Manually pulling data from all those sources is where most of the work actually happens. To automate that entire workflow, we built Graphed. We let you connect all your marketing and sales data in one click, then use natural language to build live, interactive dashboards that update automatically. It’s like having an AI analyst who handles everything from data collection to visualization, so you can always see what’s working across your entire business in real-time.