If you have =COPILOT() formulas in a workbook, the generated text in those cells is at risk. The function retires on September 14, 2026, and Microsoft has not said whether existing formulas will keep returning values or start failing.
This guide is the practical rescue task: getting the output out of the formulas and into cells that cannot break. It takes a few minutes per workbook, and it works regardless of which way Microsoft’s decision goes.
Why Converting to Values Is the Only Reliable Protection
A cell containing =COPILOT("Classify the sentiment...", A2) is not storing the word “positive”. It is storing an instruction to go and fetch that word from a service. The text you see is the current result of that instruction.
When the service is retired, the instruction has nowhere to go. Converting to values throws away the instruction and keeps the answer.
This is worth doing even in the optimistic case where Microsoft leaves existing formulas working. Non-determinism was always a property of this function — the same prompt on the same cell could return a differently-worded answer on recalculation. Freezing the output is good practice whether the function survives or not.
The Basic Conversion
Method 1 — Paste Special over the top
The fastest approach when you want to keep the results exactly where they are:
- Select the range containing your
=COPILOT()formulas. - Copy (
Ctrl+C, orCmd+Con Mac). - Without moving the selection, right-click and choose Paste Special.
- Choose Values, then OK.
The formula bar will now show the text itself rather than a formula. That cell is now permanent.
Method 2 — Keep the formula alongside the result
If you want a record of which prompt produced which answer — useful for audit trails, or for rebuilding the workflow later on a different tool — do this before converting:
- Insert a new column next to your results.
- In the first cell, enter
=FORMULATEXT(B2), pointing at your first=COPILOT()cell. - Drag down the full range. You now have the prompt text as data.
- Convert both columns to values using Method 1.
This is the version we would recommend for anything that touches financial records, where being able to show how a classification was produced matters more than the classification itself.
Checking You Caught Everything
The failure mode here is missing cells, not botching the conversion. Two checks worth running before you close the file:
Find remaining formulas
Press Ctrl+F, click Options, set Look in to Formulas, and search for COPILOT(. Set the scope to Workbook rather than Sheet so it covers every tab. Anything it finds is still live.
Check for hidden and very hidden sheets
Right-click any sheet tab and choose Unhide. Sheets hidden through the VBA editor will not appear there — if the workbook came from someone else and you suspect it has more to it, that is worth checking before you trust a clean search result.
Finding Every Affected Workbook
Converting one workbook is easy. Knowing which workbooks need it is the harder half.
Search each storage location separately, because none of them index the others:
- Local drives. Windows File Explorer content search will look inside
.xlsxfiles for text. - OneDrive and SharePoint. Use the search box within the document library. Content search covers Office file contents.
- Teams. Files posted in channels live in the associated SharePoint site — search there rather than in the Teams client.
- Email attachments. The most-missed location. A workbook someone sent you in March is not in any of the above.
Prioritise templates. A template with =COPILOT() in it produces a new broken workbook every time someone copies it, and the person copying it will not know why.
What to Do With Recurring Workflows
Converting to values saves what you already produced. It does nothing for a process that needs to run again next month.
Be honest about which of your uses were genuinely recurring. In our experience most =COPILOT() work was one-off cleanup that felt like it would become a process and never did. For the ones that really do recur:
- Power Query handles deterministic transformation well — splitting, merging, reformatting, lookups against a reference table. If your “AI” task was actually a rules task, this is the better tool and always was.
- Office Scripts can call an external API and write results back to cells, which is the closest structural match to what the function did. It requires someone comfortable writing TypeScript.
- Third-party add-ins provide worksheet-level AI functions directly. This is the closest drop-in replacement, at the cost of introducing another vendor and another data-processing agreement to review.
- The Copilot side pane covers ad-hoc analysis and summarisation, but will not populate a column. See our side pane comparison for where the line falls.
One Thing Worth Doing Anyway
Before you convert, take a moment to sample the output you are about to make permanent.
=COPILOT() produced plausible-looking wrong answers with no error to flag them. Converting to values makes those wrong answers permanent and removes the evidence of how they were generated. If you are freezing a classification column that feeds a report, spot-check twenty rows first.
Our errors and diagnostics guide covers the silent-failure problem in more depth, including why it is the most dangerous of the function’s failure modes.