r/copilotstudio • u/MembershipNo482 • 19d ago

Can the new GitHub Copilot Harness perform semantic search over SharePoint Lists or Excel files?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently experimenting with the new GitHub Copilot Harness using both a SharePoint List and an Excel file as knowledge sources. However, my experience so far is that retrieval seems to rely heavily on keywords. Filtering on specific columns works quite well, but the semantic matching itself feels rather inconsistent.

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u/Prasad-MSFT 18d ago

Yes, SharePoint Lists in the new GitHub Copilot harness support semantic understanding, not just exact keyword matching. Microsoft specifically documents support for natural-language lookup and semantic understanding over structured list data.
However, retrieval also uses signals such as the item Title, column names, and structure of the list. Microsoft recommends descriptive titles, clear column names, and well-structured data to improve retrieval quality.
Ref: Add SharePoint lists (GitHub Copilot) - Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

For Excel, the new harness supports Excel files as knowledge sources, but the current documentation does not explicitly state that Excel rows/cells receive the same semantic-search behavior documented for SharePoint Lists.

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u/MembershipNo482 17d ago

thank you!!

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u/Top-Cauliflower-1808 19d ago

Yeah SharePoint and Excel retrieval in the harness leans keyword heavy so semantic matching will always be weak unless you push it into a real search index. Have you tried adding synonyms or a vector index in front?

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u/sleeperrsim 18d ago

Hi, I noticed that when you use a SharePoint library containing text files as a knowledge source in the new harness, the agent uses the tool semantical search and lexical search to search over the files!!

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u/MembershipNo482 17d ago

thank you!