Here are all the new features Microsoft added to Excel in February 2026

Towards the end of each month, Microsoft typically publishes a roundup of all the new features it introduced to some of its popular software during the past four weeks. One of these software is Microsoft Excel, which makes sense considering that it's heavily used in personal, education, and enterprise environments for data cleaning, crunching, analysis, and visualizations. As the month draws to a close, Microsoft has detailed all the new capabilities it introduced in Excel during the month of February 2026.

This month's roundup is surprisingly brief, as it appears that Microsoft added just two new features to Excel during the month. The first is just about expanded availability of Agent Mode in Excel, with customers based in the European Union (EU) now able to leverage it too, if they are in the Current Channel or the Monthly Enterprise Channel. As a reminder, Agent Mode in Excel for Windows launched about a month ago. This AI-powered workflow is designed to offer an agentic experience that can do work on your behalf, as long as you offer a decent prompt as an input and possess a commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot license, or are a member of Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium plans.

Next, Excel for Windows and Mac gained the ability to query local, "modern" Excel workbooks through Copilot Chat. Previously, this integration was limited to content stored on the cloud but the latest update now offers a consistent experience in terms of AI assistance. Microsoft also believes that this will help users become more productive as they no longer need to have their files stored in an always-connected state and can just get started right away.

That's all there is for this month, which means that this update only excites customers actively involved in AI workflows. Others will just have to wait for the next month.

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Posted Thursday 26 February 2026 at 5:06 am AEST (my time).

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