Tools Used

• Microsoft Co-pilot (Pro / Microsoft 365)

• Microsoft Excel

• Notepad (in-built in Windows)

• Snipping Tool (in-built in Windows)

Use Case Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2dZpoWEdV8

Problem Statement

You have an Excel file containing Salary figures of our employees for individual month. As a payroll in-charge you need to calculate Profession Tax for each employee for every month. Below is the screenshot of the same for reference Purpose.

Date column contains 1^st day of month to identify the month to which Salary figure pertains. Profession Tax calculation varies from state to state. Let’s assume that you want to calculate Profession Tax for “Maharashtra” state, where the slabs are as below:

We will use Microsoft Co-pilot chat-based interface to explain requirements and generate complex Excel formula to calculate the same.

Solution

One can quickly get a solution by uploading Excel file on AI platform. But it will lead to breach of data privacy. So, we will use blunt prompts to describe our requirement and explain our data, by exposing just a few sample rows to LLM. Below are the steps for the solution for the problem statement.

Step 1: Identify & Hide PII

Maintaining data privacy is the first and foremost duty of any user using an AI platform. One must first identify any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) or any sensitive business information which might lead to breach of privacy. In our case study, “Name” column / field is a PII. So, we need to make a copy of this worksheet & exclude it. Just insert one more worksheet & copy-paste all the data (excluding Name column). Refer below screenshot.

Step 2: Describe the data

An AI platform needs to know some details about the data, since it attempts to analyze patterns from it. Assuming you have paid version of Co-pilot subscription (which is add-on to Microsoft 365) open website copilot.microsoft.com . A window as below should appear.