Microsoft Copilot Prompts for Finance Analyst

Understand Your Audience: The first step in crafting ChatGPT prompts for Financial Advisors is to understand the audience you'll be interacting with. Financial Advisors deal with a wide range of clients, each with unique financial goals, concerns, and levels of expertise. Consider the language and tone that resonates with your target audience, whether they are seasoned investors or individuals seeking basic financial advice.

Example Prompt:

"Hello! How can I assist you today with your financial goals? Whether you're planning for retirement, managing investments, or simply looking for budgeting tips, I'm here to help."

Provide Clear Guidance: Clarity is essential when crafting prompts for ChatGPT interactions. Financial Advisors need prompts that guide clients through relevant topics and prompt them to provide necessary information for effective assistance. Avoid ambiguity and ensure that prompts are straightforward and easy to understand.

Example Prompt:

"To better assist you, please provide details about your current financial situation, including your income, expenses, savings, and any specific financial goals you're working towards. The more information you provide, the better I can tailor my advice to your needs."

Offer Personalized Support: Clients value personalized attention from their Financial Advisors, and ChatGPT prompts can mimic this personalized approach. Tailor prompts to address specific client needs and preferences, making clients feel heard and understood.

Example Prompt:

"Welcome back! Last time we discussed your retirement goals. Have you made any progress towards those goals, or do you have any new financial concerns you'd like to address today?"

Get the Best ChatGPT Prompts here.

Encourage Engagement: Encouraging client engagement is crucial for effective communication. Craft prompts that invite clients to ask questions, share their thoughts, and actively participate in the conversation. This fosters a sense of collaboration and trust between the client and the Financial Advisor.

Example Prompt:

"Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions about the investment options we discussed earlier. Your understanding of your financial choices is important, and I'm here to provide clarity and guidance."

Provide Actionable Advice: Financial Advisors rely on ChatGPT to provide actionable advice that clients can implement to improve their financial well-being. Craft prompts that prompt clients to take specific actions or consider particular strategies to address their financial goals.

Example Prompt:

"Based on your current financial situation, I recommend increasing your monthly contributions to your retirement account by 10%. This will help you reach your retirement goals faster and ensure financial security in the future."

Be Empathetic and Supportive: Financial planning can be a complex and stressful process for many clients. Show empathy and support through ChatGPT prompts, reassuring clients and alleviating any concerns they may have about their financial situation.

Example Prompt:

"I understand that managing finances can feel overwhelming at times. Remember that you're not alone, and I'm here to help you navigate through any challenges you may encounter along the way.

Microsoft Copilot Prompts For Finance Teams

It’s important to note that Microsoft Copilot in Excel is still in a preview stage, which means it has some limitations in functionality and more features will be added over time. Even so, it can still prove quite useful when users get the hang of writing effective prompts. Microsoft Copilot for PowerPoint, however, is more advanced in its maturity, which can prove especially useful when building financial reports and presentations. ? With that, here are some Copilot prompts for finance teams:

Copilot Prompt 1: “Merge Columns A and B Into One Column”

While there are Excel formulas to do these sorts of tasks—merging columns or cells—you may not know them off the top of your head. Asking Copilot to do this command for you, using natural language, can save some time and potential manual effort.?

Copilot Prompt 2: “Add a New Column for X”

Another way you can use Copilot to navigate or customize your Excel spreadsheets is by asking it to add specific columns. For instance, if you were reviewing an income statement in Excel, you could ask Copilot to create a column for your profit margin. The real magic of Copilot here is that users don’t even need to dig in and tell Copilot the formula to use (profit margin = profit / revenue)—it should intrinsically know this and apply it to the new column. Microsoft MVP Kenji Farre demonstrates this effectively in his video here.? For these types of generative prompts, Copilot will provide a suggestion that shows which formula it intends to use, which you can then accept and apply.

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We tested out Copilot in Excel using sample data—a marketing report—generated by Copilot. We asked Copilot to add a column in the table to show the engagement rate for all the marketing campaigns. Copilot provides an explanation of the formula it will use and the context behind it.

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Using this same data set, we also asked Copilot to add a column in the table for ROI. Copilot intrinsically knew that to find the ROI of each marketing campaign, it would need to subtract the budget from the revenue and divide the difference by the initial budget, before multiplying by 100.?

Copilot Prompt 3: “Summarize Revenue for X”

Copilot really shines as a summarization tool, and prompts asking it to summarize a key value (revenue, in our example) for specific time frames can be fruitful. An analysis like this can seem simple on the surface, but ad hoc requests for data can be a big time suck for FP&A professionals. Letting Copilot do the work can save valuable time, ultimately letting you and your team access the insights faster.

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Using the same data set as before, we asked Copilot in Excel to summarize revenue for only the month of January. As well as giving us our answer, Copilot generated a pivot table in seconds, which we could then insert into the file as a new sheet.

Copilot Prompt 4: “Summarize X in Three Key Trends”

Beyond creating summaries, Copilot can go a step further: you can also ask it to identify trends within the data that may require a little digging to parse out. Not only that, but you can also ask Copilot to visualize trends—using a prompt that would include language as simple as “visualize key trends,” or something similar. Asking Copilot to dig out a few key trends to help tell the broader story of a previous quarter is another example of Copilot possibly saving finance teams hours of work.

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Working with the same data set as before, we asked Copilot to provide us with three key takeaways for the entire table. Copilot provided us with a summary of the highest and lowest performing campaigns, which can easily be copied to share with stakeholders.

Copilot Prompt 5: “Add an Image of Table A With Arrows to Slide 15”

While we’ve mostly focused on how Copilot can be used with tools such as Excel, don’t forget that it’s also integrated with the broader Microsoft ecosystem. That means you can also use it to edit and create decks or slideshows in PowerPoint.? This can be helpful for implementing visuals, charts or tables into a presentation and saving time on formatting your slides. Copilot in PowerPoint can also reference your files (currently limited to Word documents) stored in your OneDrive or SharePoint to build presentations and slides.

Copilot Prompt 6: “Summarize This Presentation Into 3 Key Takeaways”

We’ve discussed how Copilot can create summaries, and it also works well with PowerPoint presentations. If you find yourself trying to generate some takeaways from a deck, Copilot can do some of the work for you in a similar way that it can summarize other documents or data sets.?

The Art of the Prompt: Crafting Microsoft Copilot Prompts

As anyone who has experimented with generative AI tools like ChatGPT knows, your output is only as good as your prompt. Microsoft does provide some guidance for Copilot users as to how to write effective prompts. That guidance says that prompts can include four parts:?

• A goal: What do you want Copilot to do, exactly?
• The context: Why you need it, and who is involved
• Expectations: How Copilot will best fulfill the request
• Source: What information do you want Copilot to draw from?

Add those together, and you can get a sense of the nuts and bolts of the prompt-writing formula. It’s a bit more intuitive than it sounds, however. With this in mind, we can dissect one of our example prompts to see how it fits the criteria. “Add an image of Table A with arrows to slide 15” With this prompt, we are hitting on all four guide posts:

• Our goal is to add an image to a slide, which we are making clear in the prompt.
• The context is that we need an asset from a data set added to a specific location.
• Our expectation is that Copilot can grab the image and insert it where we directed.
• The source is Table A and we’re telling Copilot where to place it.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do when writing prompts—especially as a part of a finance team with access to multitudes of data, files, and reports—is to be specific. Framing a question or directive can be easy to get the hang of, but you’re going to want to be as specific as possible with your prompts, too, so that Copilot doesn’t reference or access the wrong information. In our above example, it may be best to tell Copilot to add “an image of Table A from “Document Name,” as you can ask Copilot to reference specific files (.docx, etc.) when writing your prompt.

A Few Quick Notes About Using Copilot With Excel

Here are a few things to keep in mind about using Copilot with Excel, which may help avoid workflow issues:

• Copilot should integrate with Excel assuming your organization has a Microsoft 365 subscription and corresponding Copilot plan that grants access to all of its features.
• Copilot is only available for Excel files (such as .xlsx or .xlsm file types) that are stored on OneDrive or SharePoint, with the AutoSave feature turned on—the Copilot button will appear inactive in Excel if you’re working with unsupported file types saved locally.
• Copilot will only work with Excel tables, and is limited to handling tables of up to two million cells.