Copilot Request
Compare two Excel workbooks. Report all value changes, formula changes, added/removed rows, and missing worksheets. Generate the results as an Excel report.
What you did is actually the correct upload method. The issue is that Copilot Web can handle uploaded Excel files in a few different ways depending on the session and feature rollout.
To maximize the chance that I receive the actual workbook binary (so I can create a downloadable comparison workbook):
- Start a new chat.
- Click Upload images and files.
- Select the two
.xlsxfiles from your PC. - Wait until the files appear as attachments.
- Send a message such as:
Compare these two Excel files and create an Excel differences report.
A few things to avoid:
- Don't use Attach cloud files.
- Don't paste OneDrive links.
- Don't open the workbook first and share it from Excel.
- Upload the local
.xlsxfiles directly from disk.
What happened in this session is that Copilot exposed the workbook contents as searchable document data rather than giving me direct access to the workbook files themselves. I could read and compare the data, but I couldn't generate and return a new .xlsx report from those attachments.
A quick test:
- Create a brand-new chat.
- Upload a small Excel file (even a simple test workbook).
- Ask: "How many sheets are in this workbook?"
- If I can inspect workbook metadata and generate files from it, then the binary upload path is working.
Based on the files you uploaded, I was able to determine that the two workbooks are effectively identical except for the worksheet name (parts vs Imported). [Parts Demo...61103.xlsx | Excel], [Parts Demo...61103.xlsx | Excel]
If you'd like, I can also show you a very robust Excel/VBA or Python comparison utility that will generate the exact differences report locally on your machine for large BOM and parts-library comparisons.
