“Should I be using ‘Edit with Copilot’ in Excel?”

This was asked by Anna, a Finance Leader, in my community.

It’s one of the many Microsoft features finance pros aren't using. Because they're worried about licenses or usage costs.

So on Monday I will show you how to ​Master Microsoft Copilot in Excel, PowerPoint, and beyond with Ramp. In 60-Mins, you will learn how to:

• Get messy finance data analysis-ready
• Spot trends, variances, and outliers (without formulas or code)
• Turn analysis into board approved (company branded presentations)

All without worrying about your AI usage.

There are not many chances to learn from me for free. This is why 2,604 finance pros registered last time.

You mastered Microsoft Excel already. Now ​join me here​ to master Microsoft Copilot.

“Very powerful…but I’m worried about it”

So, a few weeks ago, on our monthly office hours Zoom, one of our members said this to me this about Microsoft Copilot Cowork:

"I don't have a usage, so I'm frightened to have it. Very powerful, it's super, but actually, I don't even know how to restrict it with some of our staff, because you can send so many emails and change so many things that I'm worried about it."

That's Noeleen. She runs finance for her company. And she’s not even a beginner, she already tested Microsoft Copilot Cowork since two days before that call.

Because I never came from the tech world, when a tool can send an email or change (or delete) a file on its own without me clicking anything, my auditor brain goes straight to: okay, but who controls that?

So today 2 things:

1. How to protect yourself from over-using credits in Copilot (My Crawl, Walk, Run method)
2. The right way to set up Microsoft Copilot Cowork

You are not learning for free any more

Imagine your finance team gets a new team member on Monday. Really really smart intern - they read everything, they know Excel and PowerPoint. But this intern also has a company credit card, and every single thing they try costs money from day one.

That's Copilot Cowork since July 1st.

Before that date, during the Frontier preview, testing was free. Now, each time Cowork does a task, it uses credits, and credits add up to real money. So if your team is doing what everybody does with a new tool (try it, tweak it, try again) you are not learning for free anymore. You are paying, each time, inside a tool that bills you automatically.

I did the maths on the call. If your team runs the same test 50 times in one day while they figure out what works - and this happens fast when people are excited - that's already $100 to $200. Gone. Before you even used it for one single useful thing! Crazy, right?

So no, Noeleen was not wrong to be frightened. But she was frightened of the wrong thing. Cowork is not dangerous because it's powerful. Cowork is dangerous because most people use it to learn, and learning should never happen inside the tool that bills you per task.

Let me show you how to fix this.

Crawl, Walk, Run

I said the exact same thing on three different coaching calls this month, to three finance leaders with three completely different problems.

The rule: you crawl in chat, you walk once in Cowork (or ChatGPT Work, or Claude Cowork), and only then do you let it run on its own.

Crawl. Open normal Copilot chat, not Cowork. Upload your files. Ask for the thing you want. Rewrite the prompt as many times as you need - this is already included in your license, so it costs you nothing on top. This is where you make your mistakes (for free)

Walk. Once the output in chat is good (like 80% of the way there) open Cowork and run it one time. Watch every step, because Cowork will pause and ask you before it sends an email or saves a file, and this pause is your audit moment. Use it. Read what it's about to do before you say yes.

Run. Once that one run worked, ask Cowork to save it as a skill. And like this, the exact same logic runs every time, automatically, and you never pay the "figuring it out" tax again.

How to set up Copilot Cowork (and use it well)

Note - Feel free to forward this to your IT team.

Setting it up

Before anybody on your team touches Cowork, three things need to happen, and they happen in this order.

1. Get the right license.

You need a Microsoft 365 Copilot Business license. It runs $21 per user per month billed annually (discounted to $18 through September 30, 2026), or $25.20 per user per month if you bill monthly. Your personal or family Copilot plan will not work, because it doesn't support agents or workplace data. If you're on the wrong plan, Cowork simply won't help you.

2. An admin has to switch it on, in two places.

Go to Admin, then Copilot, then Settings, then View All. In there, you activate Copilot and turn on the Anthropic provider - yes, Copilot Cowork runs partly on Claude models and partly on GPT models, just packaged inside Microsoft's environment. Give it up to three hours after activating, not minutes. Microsoft's documentation flags this delay explicitly, so do not assume it is broken.

3. Assign the license to each person, one by one.

Decide who gets it - everybody, or just a pilot group. Once assigned, Cowork shows up in the agents list inside Copilot for that person, and it's ready to connect to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

4. Set up consumption limits

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Copilot and then the Cost Management node.

In the Billing method section, select how your organization is billed for Copilot credit usage.

In the Set the monthly spending limit for this policy section, select one of the options.

1. Don't limit monthly spending - Allows the policy to use credits against the organization's billing method without restrictions.
2. Limit monthly spending - Limits the number of credits the default policy can spend each month.

Best practices

Three things:

1. Use corporate storage, not your desktop. Cowork cannot read files sitting on your local desktop. Your working files need to live in SharePoint or your corporate OneDrive (not your personal or family one) because that's where Cowork can access
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2. Watch which credentials the agent runs on. An agent can run on "maker credentials" - meaning it sees everything the person who built it can see, even if the person using it shouldn't see that data. Or it can run on "end-user credentials," where it only ever sees what that user is allowed to see. For anything touching sensitive finance data, always use end-user credentials.
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3. Be specific in the prompt, because you can't restrict by folder. Somebody asked exactly this on our call: can I stop Copilot from reaching certain files on my OneDrive? The answer is no, you can't restrict it that way. What you can do is be precise in what you ask for - tell it exactly where to look and exactly what to use. The restriction comes from your prompt, not from settings.

And on top of all this - check the admin panel before you scale to the whole team. Go to Copilot, then Cowork, and you decide there who has access, and you put a spending limit per person. This is what Noeleen needed straight away.

Finance Use Cases for Cowork

Not every finance task is good in Cowork. Chat is enough for a quick question. Cowork earns its cost when the task needs a sequence - like getting the data, then transforming it, then producing something finished.

1. Board decks, end to end. Give it the Excel working file and your branding guidelines, and ask it to build the PowerPoint from that. This is the exact demo I ran on our call - connect to the folder, find the file, apply the branding, build the deck. It did the whole thing on its own, including the QA step, and I could schedule it to run every month automatically.
2. Month-end dashboards. Point it at your close working files and ask for KPIs, variance month-over-month, and cost by category, with commentary written like a seasoned CFO would write it. One of our members built a full HTML dashboard this way - the kind her BI team couldn't deliver in six months.
3. Cost centre and variance analysis. Ask it to extract and summarize expense by cost centre from your use-case folder. This is the lighter, cheaper end of Cowork tasks - good for testing model cost differences before you commit to a more complicated workflow.
4. Reconciliation, with a verification step built in. Cowork can do the first pass on reconciliation, but always ask it to show you the calculation logic afterward - "explain to me the logic" - so you can check it took the right column and not, say, budget minus actual instead of actual minus budget. That's the typical junior mistake. Catch it before you trust the output.

The One thing to remember

Test in chat. Pay in Cowork.

That’s it.

Noeleen was right to be careful with a tool that can send emails and change files on its own. You should be careful too. But careful is not the same as frightened.

Careful means you test where it's free, before you pay for the version that is live.
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Best

Your AI Finance Expert

- Nicolas

P.S. - The best way to learn from me directly is to join my weekly masterclasses. 60-mins + Q&A where I’ll get all your AI in Finance questions answered. Join me here.

P.P.S - Still unsure when to use Copilot Chat vs Cowork? This video answers it in under a minute → How to Prepare Finance Presentations Effortlessly With Copilot Cowork​

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