Using AI to create a dashboard in Excel is becoming more practical as new tools integrate directly with spreadsheet workflows. The general approach works like this: instead of manually selecting data ranges, building pivot tables, and formatting charts one by one, you provide a prompt or description of what you want, and the AI generates the dashboard components for you.
Microsoft has added Copilot to Excel as part of its 365 suite. Copilot can analyze your data, suggest charts, create pivot tables, and highlight trends based on natural language questions. You can ask it something like "show me monthly revenue by region as a bar chart" and it will attempt to build that visualization from your existing spreadsheet data. It works best when your data is already formatted as a proper table with clear headers and no gaps. The results are not always perfect on the first try, so expect to refine your prompts and adjust the output manually.
Outside of Excel itself, several AI-powered platforms take a different approach. Instead of adding AI features inside a spreadsheet, they let you upload your Excel file or connect to your data source and build a full dashboard in a separate interface. AgentUI is one example of this approach. You describe the dashboard you need in plain language, upload your Excel data or connect a live data source, and the platform generates an interactive dashboard with filters, charts, and summary cards. The advantage is that the result is a standalone application rather than a spreadsheet with charts layered on top.
There are meaningful differences between these two paths. Adding AI inside Excel keeps you within a familiar environment, but you are still limited by Excel's layout constraints, manual refresh requirements, and file size limits. Building with an external AI tool gives you a purpose-built dashboard that updates automatically, handles larger datasets, and can be shared with teammates through a simple link rather than emailing spreadsheet files back and forth.
For quick, one-off analysis where you already have data in Excel, Copilot is a reasonable starting point. For recurring dashboards that need to stay current, pull from multiple sources, or serve as a shared reference for your team, an AI dashboard builder outside of Excel will save you significantly more time in the long run. The key is matching the tool to the complexity of what you are trying to build.