Here are all the new features Microsoft added to Excel in August 2025

August 2025 is drawing to a close, which means that it is time yet again for Microsoft to recap all the features that it added to Excel this month. We have already covered some of these capabilities in dedicated articles recently, but it's useful to have a summary of all the latest enhancements present in the most popular spreadsheet tool every now and again.

Starting off with Excel for Windows and Mac, Insiders can now leverage the COPILOT() function that enables them to prompt the built-in AI model in natural language to achieve various outcomes like sentiment analysis, classification, summary generation, and more. It's quite similar to the AI() function that was introduced in Google Sheets a couple of months back.

Excel for Windows and the web also gained the Explain Formula feature, which does exactly what it says on the tin through the power of AI. We covered the inline assistant in detail here.

Meanwhile, all three main Excel platforms, Windows, Mac, and web can now leverage the Python programming language to analyze images directly in Excel. That said, the capability is exclusive to Insiders for now. Other minor enhancements that arrived on Excel for Windows are new customization options for the Draw tab and a couple of new pens for annotation.

Finally, Excel for web customers netted the ability to directly edit data label texts in visualizations, a feature that was already available on Windows. That said, its arrival on the web means that customers don't need to switch platforms for a relatively minor edit. This is something that was highly requested by Excel users so it has been tagged as "#FIA", which translates to "Feedback in Action". If you have feedback about existing capabilities or want to request new ones, make sure to let the company know via the built-in feedback utility in Excel.

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Posted Wednesday 27 August 2025 at 3:05 am AEST (my time).

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