If you build reports for a living, you know the analysis is often the easy part. The slog comes afterward: recoloring charts to match the style guide, swapping fonts, fixing header fills, placing the logo, and then doing it all again next month.
Workbook branding is exactly the kind of repeatable, rules-based work AI should be handling for us. With skills in Copilot in Excel, it finally can.
In this post, I’ll walk through how Copilot’s built-in brandkit skill works, how to create a brand kit so Copilot knows what your brand actually looks like, and a prompt you can adapt for your own workbooks.
What skills are in Copilot in Excel?
Skills package up repeatable tasks so you do not have to explain the same instructions in every prompt. You invoke one by typing @ followed by the skill name in the Copilot pane. Copilot then follows the instructions built into that skill rather than improvising everything from scratch.
I wrote more about how skills compare with projects and custom instructions here:
Some skills are ones you build yourself. Others are created and managed by Microsoft, including brandkit and theme-design. Both appear in the Formatting folder of the Manage skills dialog and are enabled by default, so there is nothing additional to install.
The theme-design skill applies an Excel theme across the workbook using guidance from the Excel design team. It reads the workbook’s structure and content, then styles charts, tables, and cells with more consistent borders, contrast, and visual hierarchy. It is a useful option when you want a more polished workbook but do not have formal brand standards to enforce.
The brandkit skill goes further. It carries your brand guidelines throughout the workbook, including colors, typography, headers, charts, tables, and other visual elements. It can also reference a brand kit created in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, which means it can use your actual hex codes, fonts, and logos.
Setting up a brand kit
The brandkit skill is only as useful as the brand kit behind it. That kit gets created in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app rather than inside Excel.
From the Copilot app, go to Create. If you do not see it in the left navigation pane, check under the waffle menu. From there, select More…, then Brand kits, and choose New brand kit.
You can configure the assets that define your brand, including:
- Primary and secondary logos
- Official colors and hex codes
- Heading and body fonts
- Approved images and icons
- Templates
- Brand voice and written guidelines
You can also upload an existing brand guidelines PDF. Copilot will attempt to extract the rules, which you can then review and refine before publishing the kit.
A few practical notes before you dive in. Official brand kits published across an organization require the appropriate Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing and must be created by a designated brand manager. An IT administrator has to assign that role, and the permission may take some time to appear.
For a solo consultant or small team, a personal or shared brand kit may be enough. Personal kits are visible only to you, while shared kits can be made available to selected people. If your brand assets already live in a SharePoint Organization Assets Library, you can reference those rather than uploading everything again.
Putting the brandkit skill to work
Let’s give Copilot a real report to work on. I’ve put together a sample workbook you can download and follow along with:
The workbook contains a fictional 2025 software sales report. The analysis is already solid: structured tables and formulas, a regional summary, and two clear charts. What it lacks is any intentional formatting.
We’ll use the brandkit skill to apply the company’s colors, headings, table styles, chart formatting, and logo without manually working through the Format pane. Once your kit is in place, open the workbook and the Copilot pane, then invoke the skill using the @ sign. Here is the prompt I used:
@brandkit Apply my brand guidelines to this workbook. Format the summary table and both charts using my brand colors, apply my heading font to the title rows, style the table headers with my primary brand color, and insert my logo in the top-left of the report sheet.
You can also be more specific. Ask Copilot to restyle one chart, clean up a particular table, or fix a section that a colleague formatted in defiance of all known style guides. Because the skill references the brand kit, you do not need to type out every hex code or font name. Your prompt describes what should change, while the kit supplies the actual brand rules.
Before and after
Before, the sheet was clean and functional but looked like a standard Excel workbook. It used the default blue chart style and had very little visual hierarchy.
After applying the Stringfest branding skill, the title bar, section headings, tables, chart colors, labels, and logo followed a consistent red-and-orange system. The analysis did not change, but the workbook looked much more intentional and presentable. You can download the branded version here.
That said, I would still treat the result as a first draft. The workbook is clearly more Stringfest-branded than before, but I am not sold on every decision. The orange chart and orange gridlines feel heavy, and I am not sure why Copilot added data labels. Those are exactly the kinds of choices that still need a human review.
This is where a data visualization style guide can help. I wrote more about using one with Copilot in Excel here:
Microsoft also has a newer data visualization skill that may help with some of this, although it is still very new and I have not spent much time with it yet.
I also noticed that Copilot did not truly remove the worksheet gridlines. It instead filled the worksheet background with white instead, which is a pretty ridiculous rookie mistake for Copilot to be making at this point.
Custom instructions and personalization may reduce some of these misses. You may also decide that the brandkit skill is best treated as a rough first pass, followed by a short manual cleanup. The jury is still out. For now, I am interested in showing what the tool can realistically do today, including the parts it does not get quite right.
Next steps
Branded formatting is only one part of what Copilot in Excel can do. If you want to build real fluency, from your first prompts through analysis, automation, and beyond, I’ve pulled together all of my Copilot in Excel learning resources in one place: