Issue of using Microsoft365 Copilot on Excel

Copilot in Excel does not provide the same folder-wide, multi-document workspace as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat; select the required SharePoint files explicitly and ask Copilot to extract defined data into the workbook.

Use the files explicitly in Excel

PDF and PowerPoint files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive are supported as sources for adding data to Excel. Copilot in Excel is primarily designed to build, edit, and analyze workbook content rather than discover every document in a folder automatically.^1^^2^

1. Open the destination workbook in Excel.
2. Select the Copilot icon in the lower-right corner.
3. In the prompt area, use Add content/Add sources, or type /, and search for a specific SharePoint file by its exact name.
4. Select the PDF or PowerPoint file rather than relying on the automatically suggested results.
5. Give Copilot an Excel-oriented instruction with the required output structure, for example:

   From Project Status.pdf, extract project name, owner, deadline, status, and risks. Insert the results as an Excel table with one row per project.

6. Repeat for the other files or process them in smaller batches, then ask Copilot to consolidate the inserted tables.

The reference picker may show email, meetings, or other organizational information because these are also supported internal sources for Excel. Those suggestions are relevance-ranked; they are not a complete listing of the selected SharePoint folder.^1^

For analysis across all 13 files

Use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat instead when the goal is cross-file Q&A, comparison, or synthesis rather than populating a workbook. Copilot Chat can attach a cloud folder, but a prompt can reference only up to 10 files or pages within a SharePoint site. Therefore, process the 13 documents in at least two batches, such as 7 and 6, and then combine the batch outputs.^3^

A practical workflow is:

1. In Copilot Chat, attach the SharePoint folder or explicitly select the first batch.
2. Ask for a structured table using identical columns for every batch.
3. Repeat with the remaining files.
4. Copy or export both results into Excel.
5. Use Copilot in Excel to merge, clean, calculate, chart, or build a PivotTable from that imported data.

If only summaries are needed, SharePoint itself can summarize supported PDFs and PowerPoint files, but its multi-file command accepts up to five files at a time.^4^

If a specific file still cannot be found

Check these conditions only for the missing files:

• The signed-in user can open each file directly in SharePoint.
• The SharePoint site remains searchable.
• The files are text-searchable rather than scanned, image-only PDFs.
• Newly added files have had time to enter the search index. New SharePoint documents accessible through inherited permissions to two or more users are indexed daily; PDF and PPTX are supported, up to 512 MB.^5^
• Use the exact filename or explicitly attach the file instead of depending on a broad natural-language search.

Because the Copilot application already finds all 13 files, basic access and indexing probably work for that experience. The different result in Excel is more consistent with Excel’s workbook-focused source selection than with an unsupported PDF/PPT format.

References

1. Use data from the web and internal sources with Copilot in Excel
2. Get started with Copilot in Excel | Microsoft Support
3. Refer to specific files and more in Microsoft Copilot
4. Summarize your files with Copilot | Microsoft Support
5. Semantic indexing for Microsoft Copilot