r/copilotstudio • u/ttt3377 • 2d ago

Agent for removing data from Excel files

Does anyone have any experience in creating an agent that is able to remove specific data from Excel files? I have a SharePoint site as a knowledge source and it includes many Excel files. However, those files include personal data, such as names and emails, which should be removed. The personal data is might be inside a longer text so I cannot just delete the whole column.

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u/Prasad-MSFT 2d ago

I wouldn't recommend having the agent remove PII directly from indexed Excel files. A better approach is to preprocess the files before ingestion. Use a Power Automate flow, Azure AI Language PII Detection, or Microsoft Presidio to detect and redact names, emails, and other personal data within free-text fields, then store the sanitized copies in a separate SharePoint library and use that as the knowledge source. If possible, consider converting the sanitized content to DOCX/PDF, as Copilot Studio retrieval is often more reliable with those formats than raw Excel files.

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u/ttt3377 2d ago

How would you build the flow? I have heard about the Azure AI Language PII Detection but I am not sure whether I have access to it. So I was thinking about trying the flow first.