Build a refreshable Power Query with Copilot Get Data, then prove next week's file still works

Microsoft's October 2026 Excel notes and Neowin's write-up of the AI-at-Work roadmap: Copilot in Excel for the web gets a built-in Get Data skill. You describe the data you need and how to shape it; Copilot connects, transforms, loads into the sheet, and leaves a Power Query script you can open in the Advanced Editor. Mount: treat the skill as the playbook and your prompt as this month's assignment — the durable artifact is the saved query, not the chat. Availability may still vary by tenant; if you do not see Get Data / @get-data, stop here (gap).

InflueXcel's first live test (web orders CSV with US dates like 1/13/2027): invoke with @get-data, ask for a table on a new sheet with correct types. Copilot asked permission to read the file and asked again before loading; it dropped a nameless index column on its own and used en-US locale so 1/13/2027 became 13/01/2027. Their first of five checks: confirm Queries & Connections shows a query — not values pasted into cells. They verified 612 rows and sum 2.163.477,50 against the file.

Mount's three refresh-worthy patterns when you brief Get Data: append recurring exports (combined rows should equal the sum of sources before intentional filters); unpivot wide category/month columns into fields you can Pivot; merge reference tables with an explicit left outer join when every transaction must survive, and flag unmatched codes instead of letting an inner join drop sales. He wants those decisions saved in the query, not re-decided by the model next month.

InflueXcel's folder test (one CSV per month plus a trap antiguos subfolder): Copilot filtered the subfolder path and converted text amounts — row/sum matched — but some steps fixed the column list. Their goals/blocks case also over-used fixed values even when header detection by content was correct. Check four: look in Advanced Editor for hardcoded paths, years, column name lists, and "skip N rows". Those are the bugs that only appear when next week's file changes.

InflueXcel's decisive test: next week's orders CSV dropped coupon and added gift_wrap. Refresh All failed with The column 'coupon' of the table wasn't found because the type-change step had handwritten the column list. Asking Copilot to fix it: it diagnosed the step correctly but could not edit the existing query — it created a new corrected one and left the broken query in the workbook for the human to remove. Their fifth check is mandatory: does refresh survive next week's schema?