summarize text in excel

Question

i have over 2000 responses that i need to upload in a system but system has a limit of 40 characters . how can i summarize text in excel? is there any formula that i can drag down.

i want to summarize text in such a way that it makes sense. i tried co pilot but it can summaize 3 responses not all

Answer 1

Dear @Sarosh Ahad,

Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum.

Thank you for your suggestion regarding text summarization in Excel. I truly apologize that at this time, there is no built-in Excel formula that can perform intelligent text summarization and condensing meaning like an AI would) while allowing you to drag it down across 2000+ rows. Excel formulas like LEFT, MID, or TEXTJOIN can truncate or manipulate text, but they don't understand context or generate meaningful summaries, they just cut or combine strings mechanically. For example:

• =LEFT(A2, number) would simply take the number characters from cell A2, but it often cuts off mid-word and loses sense.
• =TEXTJOIN(" ",TRUE,LEFT(A2,20),MID(A2,21,20)) might split and rejoin, but it's still not a true summary.

Moreover, we completely understand how valuable such a capability would be, especially for users who work with large volumes of data and need quick, meaningful summaries for reporting or analysis. Your feedback highlights an important need, and we encourage you to share it directly with Microsoft via https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback. This helps ensure that user-driven ideas like yours are considered for future updates.

To ensure your feedback reaches the right teams, I highly recommend submitting your feedback directly to Microsoft Ideas · Community  where our product development team can know your requirements and ideas for product improvements. If enough users raise ticket for the same idea, Microsoft may consider adding this feature in the future. 

Note: As Microsoft Community moderators, please note that we are not involved in product design decisions and do not have direct access to the development roadmap, we want to assure you that your feedback has been acknowledged and is valued.  

I hope this information is helpful. Please follow these steps and let me know if it works for you. If not, we can work together to resolve this.

I'm looking forward for your reply.

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Answer 2

Dear @Sarosh Ahad,

Thank you for your response!

I'm glad that my answer was able to address your concern. If you see my initial answer is helpful, please accept it as an answer, which will definitely help others in the community who have similar queries to find an answer to their queries faster.  

In this case, if your goal is improving customer service and ratings, but the process of reading feedback and survey responses was taking up a lot of time. It takes to much time analyzing questions and comments from customers, and it's always a painstaking task dissecting verbatims and identifying themes and insights. Here are some ways Copilot could help make this a much simpler task:

Tip 1: Use Copilot in Excel to summarize unstructured text in a table

Easily one of the best tips that could save you time when trying to dig into and get insights from feedback verbatims is to ask Copilot to do it for you! Whether it’s customer feedback, survey results, or focus group studies, you can simply ask Copilot to summarize the text data. 

In this example, I open my spreadsheet with customer ratings and feedback. I then open Copilot in Excel on the top right and ask it to “Please summarize the feedback in this sheet.” 

Copilot provides a high-level summary of the feedback, group it into different themes. Very quickly, with little effort, we already have some insights that we could start working with!

Tip 2: Add specifics to your prompt to get more precise insights

As we’ve covered in previous editions, how you craft your prompt matters. Let’s say you want to drill down further and get more insights focused on more negative reviews and areas of improvement.    Using the same example data here, you could then write a prompt like, “Hone in on Feedback with Ratings of less than 3, can you summarize this feedback and provide key themes and areas of improvement.” 

Copilot first explains what it’s doing: 

Then, based on the focused information, gives me back more detailed and specific information so that I can focus on specific aspects of customer service that I want to address, including tips on how to take action. 

Just like that, we were able to find insights from raw feedback that would’ve otherwise taken time to parse through manually, and I can instead focus on building an action plan to help address my issues! 

Moreover, if you want to generate summaries for files stored on OneDrive without the need to open them individually. Whether it's Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, or Word documents, including those shared with you or by you, you can conveniently summarize the contents of single or multiple files with ease.  For more information: Summarize your files with Copilot

For information about Summarizing survey results with Copilot in Excel: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/excelgeneral/summarizing-survey-results-with-copilot-in-excel/4229679

I hope this information is helpful. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out.

I'm looking forward for your reply.

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