[HN Gopher] ChatGPT for Excel
___________________________________________________________________
ChatGPT for Excel
Author : armcat
Score : 317 points
Date : 2026-04-15 21:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chatgpt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chatgpt.com)
| haneul wrote:
| Except for pro and plus users in the EU eh...
| flybrand wrote:
| Several months ago, ChatGPT swore to me it had interoperability
| with both excel and Google Sheets. I spent 90 minutes thinking I
| was an idiot, trying to follow its guidance before asking the
| internet.
| lateforwork wrote:
| This looks bad for Microsoft. They added a Copilot button to all
| their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side
| panel.
|
| I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned
| by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced.
| That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the
| editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is
| the presentation mode of PowerPoint.
|
| Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it
| can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.
| screye wrote:
| If AI winning means that data center companies win out, then
| the wins for Azure will more than make up for the death of
| Office.
|
| I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far
| behind though.
| boringg wrote:
| Aren't they providing a wrapper for the work of another
| company? IE msft isn't actually doing any foundational work
| thus they can't meaningfully move product capability, just
| wait for the model to improve and integrate it?
| bwat49 wrote:
| its baffling how badly microsoft has handled copilot, this is
| exactly what copilot in office should have been
| miohtama wrote:
| It's called Microslop for a reason.
| ebbi wrote:
| We have many people in my wider team (Finance) that are AI
| skeptics purely because of their experience with Copilot. Like
| they don't know what AI is actually capable of when outside of
| the shackles of Copilot.
|
| Microsoft fumbled so badly here.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| There is a significant difference in experience between Copilot
| Basic for a M365 user whose IT admins have blocked integration
| capabilities with Sharepoint content vs Copilot Premium for a
| M365 user whose IT admins have allowed integration capabilities
| with Sharepoint content.
| interroboink wrote:
| A recent funny story on this topic:
| https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly
|
| HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
| mohamedkoubaa wrote:
| Microsoft is better off not allowing copilot basic because of
| the reputational harm it will do. Not that they are thinking
| through copilot rationally
| basch wrote:
| it was a good name when chosen. too bad they have burned
| bob, clippy, cortana, sydney, and copilot already.
| alternatex wrote:
| The backend of Copilot is still called Sydney AFAIK
| compass_copium wrote:
| Don't forget Tay!
| Handy-Man wrote:
| You have to use the "agent" toggle for Copilot to behave the
| same way lol. Otherwise its pretty simple chat interface with
| the context, that's all.
| LuxBennu wrote:
| Chatgpt for Excel is still an office add-in running in the same
| sandbox though. strongpigeon described the exact bottleneck
| upthread, process boundary crossings, context.sync() roundtrips
| that take seconds on web. That's a platform limitation, not a
| model limitation. Swapping AI behind the add-in doesn't fix the
| fundamental constraint that third-party add-ins can't deeply
| integrate with Excel's runtime the way a native feature can. If
| copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I
| don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-
| in with less access is likely not be better.
| com2kid wrote:
| There is an irony here that this would be more performant
| with a 2002 coding model. A native plugin, COM, OLE,
| whatever. C++, crash prone, but fast.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the
| slowness comes from the tool calls round
| tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI's servers rather
| than the app latency.
|
| That's without talking about the poor UI and security story
| of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.
| angadsg wrote:
| Would love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel.
| Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT
| for Excel does really well on complex sheets.
| nsiemsen wrote:
| Claude for excel is already amazing. Fully capable of doing
| junior work. Formatting is great. Can refactor large multi-tab
| spreadsheets. It just burns tokens. If OpenAI is going to
| subsidize this on the monthly enterprise plans for a while then
| it's a game changer.
|
| Claude for Excel (I work in finance) was one of the absolutely
| critical reasons we added Anthropic enterprise licenses. But
| they've turned out to be quite expensive ($100/day for heavy
| users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.
| p_ing wrote:
| Cheaper to get M365 Copilot licenses for the Claude models in
| Excel.
| WillAdams wrote:
| What are the costs on that?
|
| Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?
| p_ing wrote:
| $200-something per user per year. Will vary based on
| license type and seat count.
|
| No limits.
| croes wrote:
| > No limits.
|
| Yet.
| codeugo wrote:
| lol
| mastermage wrote:
| Well other than the limits of Copilots usefullness.
| jxmesth wrote:
| I tried looking this up but wasn't able to find info on
| this on Microsoft's website. Do you have a link for this?
| p_ing wrote:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/choose-your-
| model-...
| intended wrote:
| How's that been in practice ? From what I've been following -
| Claude in finance results in models with errors that an
| analyst won't make.
|
| You get models that are formatted and structured and which
| balance - but there are errors introduced which an analyst /
| human wouldn't make.
|
| Stuff like hard coded values, or incorrect cell logic which
| guarantees the model balances.
| mukmuk wrote:
| From my experience, LLM performance in these areas is being
| massively oversold. I have repeatedly tried using Claude to
| modify a range of models typical of investment banking /
| private equity / sellside research contexts, and the
| results have been generally disastrous. On multiple
| occasions, the xlsx would no longer open.
| balderdash wrote:
| Just my experience, it's not a solution but rather a
| productivity tool. I mostly use it for tasks I can do
| myself but it would probably take 20-30min to dial in - now
| Claude can do it in 2-3min. (E.g. in a data table - add a
| new column that checks column a if the data is a, do x, if
| the data is b, do y, if the data is c, do z - then combine
| that with the word after the hyphen in column b --- or
| another example --- create a new sheet that is the same
| format as sheet one but show calculates the difference
| between column a and b bot for sheets 1-12 in a summary)
|
| I don't get good results when I just have Claude build
| things on its own - but for these types of specific
| productivity tasks I can save a couple of hours here and
| there.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I work with large files a lot, running claude code on it is
| not token intense at all. Probably because it does a lot with
| scripts. But its a bit more raw, but i think in the end more
| powerful. Have to pick a good excel library and language. I
| do node, maybe python can work as well
| infecto wrote:
| Work in a firm similar to yours and we have been going to
| though the motions of figuring ways for the bullpen to make
| use of these tools and would love to hear your thoughts if
| you would be willing to share!
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| > I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was
| stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it
| produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't
| need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all
| you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.
|
| Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that
| generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all
| you need is a browser.
|
| PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.
| jason_zig wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an
| html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
| raincole wrote:
| You mean like, double-click?
| apsurd wrote:
| you must never have actually done this. it doesn't work
| the way you think it does. unless it's self contained
| (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually
| deliver when you need it most.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully
| self-contained, no network access is needed.
| apsurd wrote:
| that's pretty cool!
| DrSAR wrote:
| hrm, double-click and your browser does the rest.
|
| For added benefit, full screen?
|
| Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this
| covers a large space of usage.
| apsurd wrote:
| you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated
| slides as a medium for _anything_ , but i've been proven
| wrong tine and again that people love their pp.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Because it was drag and drop interface. This existed for
| HTML but because web pages got too complicated, so did the
| WYSIWYGs. By just being a program to show slides, the
| editing experience was manageable for anyone. But if you
| can hust type what you want to happen into claude, editng
| experience doesnt matter as much/at all
| basch wrote:
| Or you could just talk to powerpoint, which creates a self
| contained pptx, which also plays anywhere.
|
| we've hit this point where its cool to have claude reinvent
| every wheel just because it can.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| It's not self-contained, it requires PowerPoint to be
| indfled. Which is not an issue on corporate machines of
| course, but maybe you want to do a presentation for a
| general/broader audience.
| alternatex wrote:
| Office, or rather Microsoft 365 applications have had web
| versions for a decade now.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| That's besides the point though. With a self-contained
| HTML, you don't need to go to a special website, you
| don't need an account or sign-in, heck you don't even
| need the Internet, and it works pretty much on every
| device that supports HTML5.
| hgoel wrote:
| Powerpoint will continue to persist because other people need
| to be able to edit your slide deck without understanding your
| HTML.
|
| My employer blocks office plugins, so I can't try Claude for
| PowerPoint, but sometimes I get Claude to generate Python
| scripts, which produce PowerPoint slides via python-pptx.
| This also benefits from being able to easily read and
| generate figures from raw data.
|
| I don't really like the way Claude tends to format slides
| (too much marketing speak and flowcharts), but it has good
| ideas often enough that it's still worth it to me. So I treat
| this as a starting point and replace the bad parts.
| usrme wrote:
| I'd love to get a link to that comment/post!
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| https://github.com/shawnzam/keynot
| vessenes wrote:
| Microsoft has rights to all this IP. So, it might look bad for
| their product folks, but for the corporation this is great, to
| the extent it works.
| vipipiccf wrote:
| I've had the same experience. Copilot for Excel can't even
| parse basic cell references. Meanwhile Claude handles document
| formatting in one pass. The catch is it works externally, not
| inside the app, but at least it works.
|
| The MCP ecosystem is what makes this interesting. Claude isn't
| just a chat panel bolted onto existing software, it's building
| integrations that actually manipulate the files. Microsoft had
| the distribution advantage but they're losing on capability.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| stride.microsoft.com -> microsoft has this stuff you just
| don't know it unless you are an M365 power user
| compass_copium wrote:
| I would consider myself an M365 power user and I was not
| aware of this. It is not well promoted--and after all the
| Copilot crap, I would be annoyed even if it was.
|
| Regardless, I just tried to log in with my work MS account,
| and I can't do so.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| Enterprise is Copilot Cowork one of the frontier agents.
| Has to be enabled by your organization I believe
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > They added a Copilot button to all their products but it
| doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.
|
| I was hyped when I heard about Copilot. "I can tell it to make
| pivot tables now!" When I tried to use it I was shocked how
| underbaked it was. Below even my worst expectations. This
| really was someone shoving ChatGPT into Excel with almost zero
| additional effort. Copilot can't DO anything useful.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| stride.microsoft.com -> this is a virtual machine instance
| with developer tools that allow for same sort of work Claude
| cowork does. Copilot in excel has to access the excel
| document through excel provided APIs and can't completely
| redo the document like cowork does everytime running
| developer scripts to generate it because the document
| instance is open. The model of work is entirely different.
| sarreph wrote:
| > This looks bad for Microsoft.
|
| Maybe(?) from a product catalogue perspective... But from a
| strategic perspective less so because they own ~27% of
| OpenAI.[0]
|
| [0] - https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-
| openai-pa...
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| There's a magic button you have to press to make it integrate
| fully. Everybody is confused about why this isn't the default
| behavior.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| stride.microsoft.com is the cowork equivalent I believe.
| p_ing wrote:
| Only for personal accounts. Enterprise customers have a
| Frontier agent called Copilot Cowork via the M365 Copilot
| app.... copilot.
| xeyownt wrote:
| it would be bad for Microsoft if that would use Calc on
| LibreOffice.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I am still surprised that outside of open source AI models,
| Microsoft is just routing to external models, to a degree its
| kind of smart because they don't have to have all the skin in
| the game for the infrastructure, plus they sell some of the
| hosting anyway, but man. Why does Microsoft not have a frontier
| model yet? Would have been a great time any time in the last
| few years to introduce a real Cortana AI model.
| ebiester wrote:
| They explicitly said they were ceding the frontier model game
| to others, and that they were content saying a few months
| behind the state of the art. In the long run, this is an
| interesting freeloader play that a few people are making.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-
| bene...
| leetharris wrote:
| I will say this in the most charitable terms I can. Microsoft
| simply does not have it in their culture to compete with
| something like this. Their prime days are over. They are
| slowly becoming IBM.
|
| They were completely correct to not compete in foundation
| models. They would have no chance. I mean, they can't even
| make a decent app or harness to use the other models!
| brookst wrote:
| PowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications
| that AI totally obsoletes:
|
| * A large application whose outputs are independent of the all
| (people still print slides; when presenting nobody knows or
| cares what app was used) * Complicated and requires users to
| learn lots of skills unrelated to the work they're doing
| (compare to Excel, where the model and calculations require and
| reflect domain knowledge about the data) * Practically zero
| value add in document / info management (compare to word where
| large documents benefit from structure and organization)
|
| We're pretty close to presentations just being image files
| without layers and objects and smartart and all that.
|
| AI will come for all productivity tools, but PowerPoint will be
| the canary that gets snuffed first, and soon.
| bko wrote:
| Maybe a dumb question, but why does Microsoft care? They should
| have good apps and if OpenAI or Claude wants to create plugins,
| great. That's what they're there for and Microsoft invested a
| lot of effort to make the new add-ins much more powerful and
| intuitive for this very reason. It's really nice experience
| compared to VBA.
|
| It obv makes Excel much more valuable and they can gatekeep by
| requiring the subscription for addins.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Microsoft spent a lot of effort to develop a really powerful
| editing interface. If you can replace that interface with a
| text input box, then their applications moat becomes a lot
| shallower.
| brian-jones wrote:
| I run the Excel team at Microsoft. The experience you're
| describing sounds like it's from the earlier versions of
| Copilot in Excel that were genuinely limited.
|
| Today, Excel Copilot takes a model-forward approach where we
| give the models full access to Excel's capabilities. We give
| customers the choice of the latest models from both OpenAI and
| Anthropic, and we encourage the models to iteratively explore
| the spreadsheet before taking action. It builds a full
| understanding of the semantics and structure of the
| spreadsheet, find issues in it, and ultimately gives you much
| better results.
|
| Copilot can write formulas, build PivotTables, create charts,
| build multi-tab models, do multi-step analysis. The models are
| quite proficient at it, and they do a great job. We have an
| auto-mode which is the default where we pick the model for you,
| but you can also select specific models if you have a
| preference. I often see people switch between models to get the
| benefit of diverse perspectives, similar to how a diverse team
| approaches problems differently.
|
| If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth
| another look.
| dgsegesg wrote:
| Current model is inauthentically limited?
|
| "If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth
| another look." You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's
| throats a few months ago then?
| sqircles wrote:
| > You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a
| few months ago then?
|
| :s/You/MS
|
| While I agree the widespread "race to market" with crap
| probably does and should hurt the success of these "AI-
| enabled apps," that particular area probably was not this
| individuals decision.
| shrdhdrhrdsh wrote:
| It was this person's decision to mention their senior
| role at MS then dump marketing drivel into our heads.
| It's not his hand but he still eats with it.
| drc500free wrote:
| Does Copilot behave differently in Excel depending on whether
| you got the premium subscription instead of what is included
| with Business?
|
| Many people I've talked to about Copilot don't realize that
| the dedicated "Premium" Copilot is a completely different
| experience than the "Basic/Lobotomized" Copilot that comes
| with a standard Business subscription.
|
| It's like you're running a freemium model where no one was
| actually responsible for implementing the upsell, or making
| sure the free version is useful and compelling. E.g. a
| Copilot pane in Outlook that says it can't access your
| emails, doesn't explain how, and doesn't mention an upgrade
| path that will allow it to.
| Abster1 wrote:
| I've had a really good time with the new Copilot in Excel. I
| like the model selector and tend to use Opus 4.6.
|
| Q for you Brian, I have the Microsoft 365 Premium individual
| plan ($200/yr). I got 50% off the premium plan as well when
| Microsoft was offering discounts.
|
| I've noticed when I use Claude or GPT through the Copilot
| model selector I don't see any costs for my api usage
| anywhere. Does Microsoft eat that for now?
| brian-jones wrote:
| Glad you're enjoying it! Opus 4.6 is great, and we've
| started rolling out 4.7 today.
|
| Your M365 Copilot Premium plan includes extensive usage of
| the Copilot features, including the model selector, and
| there are no additional API costs.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| just tried it: i can't even use CSV files with Copilot...
|
| Without coming across as overly rude, it is frankly
| astonishing how limited Copilot is.
|
| I do not like being an MS customer or user.
| rdedev wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying this. I was genuinely frustrated with
| copilot due to the lack of features.
|
| If it's possible please push your large business clients to
| update office. I work for a multinational pharma company and
| the copilot feature in excel deployed there is next to
| useless
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I've experimented with ChatGPT for spreadsheets the past 6
| months, and while the results look nice now it has been
| _excruciatingly_ slow for even the simplest spreadsheet. I 'm
| talking 15-20 minutes to make some pretty basic calculator with
| graphs. IIRC, it used a lot of time purely on the styling.
| jannyfer wrote:
| Adding a tangential anecdote.
|
| I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG
| and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something
| and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought
| it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output.
|
| Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it
| made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though).
|
| SVG looks similar to the XML format of spreadsheets. I wonder
| if LLMs struggle with that?
| scronkfinkle wrote:
| Claude's diagramming tool that they have built into their web
| UI is my goto for this task. It's reliable enough that I
| often will delegate to it first with what I need written in
| prose instead of using mermaid/lucid diagram
| cubefox wrote:
| Gemini is very good with SVG, but I don't really see the
| similarity to spreadsheets.
| brett-jackson wrote:
| I'd try asking it for a mermaid diagram. I think ChatGPT's
| web interface will render them.
| bob1029 wrote:
| The LLMs seem to struggle at anything that isn't relatively
| well anchored in whatever space. HTML documents have a lot of
| foundation to them in the training data, so they seem to
| perform well by comparison to other things.
|
| I just spent a few hours trying to get GPT5.4 to write
| strict, git compatible patches and concluded this is a huge
| waste of time. It's a lot easier and more stable to do simple
| find/replace or overwrite the whole file each time. Same
| story in places like Unity or Blender. The ability to
| coordinate things in 3d is really bad still. You can get
| clean output using parametric scenes, but that's about it.
| jqbd wrote:
| Parametric scenes is the whole of Houdini and any node
| based compositor etc. so there is some applications no?
| angadsg wrote:
| Engineer on ChatGPT for Excel here. Useful feedback. We have
| improved the latency inside the add-in a lot and a lot more to
| come. We also have the Fast, Standard and Heavy thinking modes,
| where you can adjust the thinking time depending on the task
| complexity. Curious to hear your feedback once you try this
| out!
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Next do one for PowerPoint and Outlook
| w2df wrote:
| Copying Anthropic again lol.
|
| Damn that OAI valuation is like a sore boil that is about to
| explode.
|
| Also once again, a lack of imagination from OAI. Damn vision
| really is super scarce huh.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| saltman look so desperate.
|
| meanwhile not that ant is genius, except the timing of dow
| drama right before Iran war.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| There's no real moat in feature set anymore. Within a given
| timeframe, any company should be able to copy some features
| from other companies. Thus the whole "distribution, marketing
| and sales are the only things that matter nowadays" joke.
|
| Obviously doesn't apply to everything, and there are some
| features that are very hard to replicate. But still.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Oh wow, I used to work on Excel Add-Ins about 10 years ago. Even
| got a patent for it. I'd be curious to see how they implemented
| the calls.
|
| We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc
| mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the
| process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on
| Excel Web). I remember fighting _so_ hard to have it be called
| `context.sync()` instead of `context.executeAsync()`...
|
| That being said, done poorly it can be slow as the round-trip
| time on web can be on the order of seconds (at least back then).
| Acmeon wrote:
| Do you mean that you worked on the Excel Add-Ins platform in
| Excel (and not on a specific Add-In)?
|
| If you were working on the platform itself, then I would be
| interested in hearing your more detailed thoughts on the
| matters you mentioned (especially since I am developing an open
| source Excel Add-In Webcellar
| (https://github.com/Acmeon/Webcellar)).
|
| What do you mean with a "OM" call? And why are they especially
| costly on Excel web (currently my add-in is only developed for
| desktop Excel, but I might consider adding support for Excel
| web in the future)?
|
| In any case, `context.sync()` is much better than
| `context.executeAsync()`.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| I worked on the Excel Add-Ins platform at Microsoft, yes. By
| OM call I mean "Object Model" call, basically interacting
| with the Excel document.
|
| The reason those calls are expensive on Excel Web is that
| you're running your add-in in the browser, so every `.sync()`
| call has to go all the way to the server and back in order to
| see any changes. If you're doing those calls in a loop,
| you're looking at 500ms to 2-3s latency for every call (that
| was back then, it might be better now). On the desktop app
| it's not as bad since the add-in and the Excel process are on
| the same machine so what you're paying is mostly
| serialization costs.
|
| Happy to answer more questions, though I left MSFT in 2017 so
| some things might have changed since.
| Acmeon wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense. For some reason, I was under the
| impression that all calculations run locally in the
| browser, which would have been comparable to how Excel
| desktop works (i.e., local calculations). Is there a reason
| for why the Excel calculations run on the server (e.g.,
| excessive workload of a browser implementation, proprietary
| code, difficult to implement in JavaScript, cross browser
| compatibility issues, etc.)? Furthermore, if the reason for
| this architecture is (or was) limitations in JavaScript or
| browsers, do you find it plausible that the Excel
| calculations will some day be implemented in Webassembly?
|
| Regardless, I have always preferred Excel desktop over
| Excel web (and other web based spreadsheet alternatives).
| This information makes me somewhat less interested in Excel
| web. Nonetheless, I find Excel Add-Ins useful, primarily
| because they bring the capabilities of JavaScript to Excel.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| I don't think Excel web will ever be running the calc
| engine browser side, no. The only way I could see this
| happen would be via compiling the core to wasm, which I
| don't think is worth the engineering effort.
|
| Excel has this legacy (but extremely powerful) core with
| very few people left that knows all of it. It has legacy
| bugs preserved for compatibility reasons as whole
| businesses are ran on spreadsheet that break if the bug
| is fixed (I'm not exaggerating). The view code for
| xldesktop is not layered particularly well either leading
| to a lot of dependencies on Win32 in xlshared (at least
| back then).
|
| Is it doable? I'm sure. But the benefits are probably not
| worth the cost.
| Acmeon wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting info! Yeah, maybe Excel web
| will someday support local calculations via wasm, but for
| now I think I will stick with Excel desktop with add-ins.
| uticus wrote:
| > Excel has this legacy (but extremely powerful) core
| with very few people left that knows all of it.
|
| Would love to hear more about this. Especially history
| and comparison to Lotus etc.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| So the first thing that's important to understand is that
| Excel is the product of another era. One where resources
| like memory were very constrained and compilers and
| optimizers weren't as good as they are today (so much so
| that the Excel team at one point wrote their own because
| MSVC sucked, but I digress)...
|
| And so, a lot of the core code is used to that. Cell
| formatting data for example is super tightly packed in
| deeply nested unions to ensure that as little memory is
| used to store that info. If something only needs 3 bits,
| it'll only use 3 bits. The calc engine compiles all of
| your formulas to its own (IIRC variable-instruction-
| width) bytecode to make sure that huge spreadsheets can
| still fit in memory and calc fast.
|
| And a lot of it still carries the same coding and naming
| practices that it started with in the 80s: Hungarian
| notation, terse variable and file names, etc. Now, IMO,
| Hungarian notation by itself is pretty harmless (and even
| maybe useful in absence of an IDE), but it seemed to
| encourage programmers to eschew any form of useful
| information from variable names, requiring you to have
| more context to understand "why" something is happening.
| Like, cool, I have a pszxoper now (pointer to zero
| terminated string of XOper), but why?
|
| So the code is tight, has a lot of optimization baked in
| and assumes you know a lot about what's happening
| already.
|
| But more importantly, a lot of "why" information also
| just lives in people's head. Yes, some teams would have
| documentation in an ungodly web of OneNote notebooks, or
| spread across SharePoint pages, which had the least
| useful search functionality I've ever witnessed, but
| finding anything you wanted was hard. But that didn't use
| to matter, since the core team had been there for a long
| time, so you could ask them question.
|
| That being said, I joined MSFT in 2012 and started
| working on Excel closer to 2014. At that point,
| heavyweight like DuaneC (who wrote like 10% of Excel and
| I don't think I'm exaggerating) had already retired and
| while others people were very knowledgeable in some
| areas, nobody seemed to have a good cross view of the
| whole thing.
|
| You have to understand that I was in the Office
| Extensibility team. We were building APIs for the _whole_
| thing. I had to touch the calc system, the cells and
| range, the formatting, tables, charts and images (the
| whole shared oart system was interesting), etc. Answering
| "How do I do X" was always a quest because you would
| usually:
|
| - Find 3 different ways of achieving it
|
| - One of them was definitely the wrong way and could make
| the app crash in some situations (or leak memory)
|
| - All the people on the "blame" had left
|
| - One of them was via the VBA layer which did some weird
| stuff (good ol' pbobj)
|
| - Be grateful that this wasn't Word because their
| codebase was much worse
|
| And so, a lot of the API implementation was trial and
| error and hunting down someone who understood the data
| structures. The fact that full sync and rebuild took
| about 6 hours (you ran a command called `ohome` and then
| you went home) meant that experimenting was sometimes
| slow (at least incremental builds were OK fast). The only
| lifeline back then was this tool called ReSearch2 that
| allowed you to search the codebase efficiently.
|
| But the thing is, once you got thing to work, they worked
| really well. The core was solid and performant. Just
| slightly inscrutable at time and not the kind of code
| you're use to reading outside of Excel.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Surely picking that apart is a good idea. Even if it
| costs a fortune, there have to be benefits.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have
| changed since.
|
| Honestly, I struggle to think about what has actually
| changed between Office 2013 and Office 2024 (and their
| Office 365 equivalents); I know the LAMBDA function was a
| big deal, but they made the UI objectively worse by wasting
| screen-space with ever-increasingly phatter _non-touch_ UI
| elements; and the Python announcement was huge... before
| deflating like a popped party balloon when we learned how
| horribly compromised it was.
|
| ...but other than that, Excel remains exactly as
| frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a
| date string - today just as it was 15 years ago[1].
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4896116/parsing-
| an-iso86...
| com2kid wrote:
| Does Excel for Web still spin up an actual copy of
| Excel.exe on a machine somewhere? I heard that is how the
| initial version worked.
| p_ing wrote:
| Never did this. WAC was the original version (integrated
| with SharePoint Server). Everything was server-side.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| > WAC
|
| Now that's an acronym that I had forgotten about.
| com2kid wrote:
| While working at MS I remember someone in the office team
| saying that the original version of Excel online spun to
| the actual Excel backend and had it output HTML instead
| of the usual win32 UI. Was I misinformed by chance?
| p_ing wrote:
| Excel Online was a component of WAC. It was an ASP.NET
| (and C++???) web application that used OAuth between
| SharePoint Server and Exchange Server.
|
| So I mean yes, you viewed Excel docs through a webpage
| just like you do today via ODSP or OneDrive consumer. The
| backend is completely different in the cloud service,
| though.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| No, as the other comment mentioned. But I've heard of
| more than a few customers running their own "server excel
| workflow" where they have an instances of excel.exe
| running a VBA macro that talks to a web server (and does
| some processing).
| w2df wrote:
| As someone that knows a high-flying portfolio manager who works
| at a very well known firm that I wont name... I can confidently
| state these tools are DOA. Ive spoken to them at length about the
| nature of what these people actually do day-to-day. If you think
| its just about using excel then you're already way off.
|
| They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these
| people are doing in the job (accounting+corporate
| finance+valuation+asset management) and what the actual
| production process is. These tools are irrelevant, disrupt flow
| and if anything just add noise to what one is doing.
| z3c0 wrote:
| This might be the first time I've seen a HN comment in a GPT
| thread that actually reflects what the average business user
| sees in GPT products.
|
| They don't do the job, reliably or well. No amount of wishful
| thinking or extra tokens will change that.
| w2df wrote:
| No surprise really.
|
| Remember when Steve said 'The computers for the rest of us'?
|
| I suppose it isn't a surprise. Are researchers/generally
| geeky people meant to be able to relate to the average
| person's day-to-day beyond their sphere? Lmao.
|
| You can't produce stuff for people you don't understand.
| Understand being a very key term.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| I know the firm - it's RenTech.
| w2df wrote:
| nah the firm in question has much higher AUM.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Citadel
| esafak wrote:
| Why are they irrelevant? You do not say anything.
| w2df wrote:
| I care not to. I hope Anthropic and OAI keep burning money on
| stuff that's DOA.
|
| I know there are employees of those firms here that would
| love to know. But nah lmao.
| airstrike wrote:
| Because the challenge is in the space between apps, not in
| the apps themselves.
| airstrike wrote:
| As a former investment banker, I mostly agree. This is probably
| 10% of the work
| w2df wrote:
| Even 10% might be generous.
|
| I bet the bozos at OAI and Anthropic think a person who deals
| with stuff like cost of capital is going to go ask an LLM for
| it.. when in reality the individual needs to know how/why
| they chose what they did.
|
| Comical stuff.
| HerbManic wrote:
| It was partially a joke but someone posted a image of Co-pilot in
| Excel to demonstrate the limits of these things. Three cells with
| three numbers (1, 2, 3) and co-pilot asked to sum these three up.
|
| Instead of answering with 6, it came up with 15. The comment was
| "If AI is doing this, a global financial crash is inevitable."
|
| Might not be real but it is something to keep an eye on.
| Hopefully, they are a bit more cautious on how this is
| implemented.
| kgeist wrote:
| I wonder why it's so bad. Do they just paste a CSV into the raw
| model? Because in my experience, even small local models can
| handle it reasonably well if the harness forces them to write &
| run a Python script that parses the table and performs the
| calculations, instead of relying solely on next-token
| prediction.
| p_ing wrote:
| Microsoft has this built-in using Claude models (for M365 Copilot
| licensed users). I don't know why you'd use this as an M365
| subscriber in an enterprise. I'm sure there's some edge cases,
| but MSFT has been moving away from OAI. Even Copilot Studio
| agents now default to Sonnet 4.6 and not GPT 5.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| > I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving
| away from OAI.
|
| You're not wrong, but you'd think that given their 27% stake in
| OpenAI they'd put more weight behind ChatGPT integration.
| p_ing wrote:
| Based on my discussion with DSEs, enterprises have not been
| impressed in the results of "Copilot", i.e. OAI models. MSFT
| has been replacing (or changing the default) to Claude across
| a variety of Copilot endpoints.
| ralph84 wrote:
| MSFT also has a stake in Anthropic (although much less than
| 27%) and they host Anthropic models in Foundry now. The end
| game for MSFT has always been being the compute provider, so
| MSFT is just as happy to use any model as long as it's
| running in Foundry.
| Acmeon wrote:
| In principle, I find it valuable to integrate tools. However, in
| this case I would be somewhat cautious, especially as "your
| chats, attachments, and workbook content -- may be shared with
| OpenAI" (as per the Microsoft Marketplace description:
| https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/WA200010215?...).
|
| This seems like a security nightmare, which is especially
| relevant because sensitive data is often stored in Excel files.
| p_ing wrote:
| That's the nature of these add-ins. Modern Add-ins are all
| little XML frames with some JS or whatever. All processing
| occurs server-side, hosted by the add-in publisher.
|
| This is counter to the old (security nightmare) COM model where
| processing could be local.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| To clarify: add-ins are essentially web pages. They can do
| some processing client side if they want, but yeah in the
| case of a ChatGPT add-in it's not like they're running the
| model in a web frame.
| sotix wrote:
| Exactly. My company's add-in is a React app, which can be
| fun to debug with the limited developer tools in
| Word/Excel's browser.
| angadsg wrote:
| Hi, engineer on this add-in. Fair concern but we never train on
| any of our business or enterprise user data, or if you have
| opted-out of training on your ChatGPT account.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance. How do you folks manage context
| retention? Say if someone had a sensitive excel document they
| wanted inference done over, how is that data actually sent to
| the model and then stored or deleted?
|
| It seems one of the biggest barriers to people's adoption is
| concern over data leaving their ecosystem and then not being
| protected or being retained in some way.
|
| Is this is an SLA that a small or medium sized company could
| get?
| p_ing wrote:
| If you're concerned, you don't send it outside of the M365
| boundary and presumably your admin has Purview Sensitivity
| Labels in place covering the document to prevent such
| activity.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Doesn't that mean you can't actually use it for those
| sensitive documents?
| p_ing wrote:
| Correct.
| Avicebron wrote:
| {EDIT} English and or the concept of written word may be
| foreign to you. Thank you for your assistance.
| p_ing wrote:
| Not sure why you'd state that. 'Correct' is a
| grammatically correct and complete sentence to your
| question.
| Acmeon wrote:
| Yeah, I was expecting that you do not train on business or
| enterprise user data. However, I am not just worried about
| "training", but also about "sharing". Furthermore, I am
| worried about cases where an individual has chosen to
| integrate an add-in and then inadvertently leaks sensitive
| data.
|
| However, it may be important to note that these security
| considerations are relevant for most Office Add-Ins (and not
| just the ChatGPT add-in).
| _pdp_ wrote:
| Why though? What is the point of this? I thought they are
| building towards an AGI.
| keyle wrote:
| Copilot is so bad that chatGPT is offered to replace it.
| [for] ... users outside the EU.
|
| hmm
| p_ing wrote:
| Your comment is recognized as low effort, but Copilot has been
| OAI models behind the scenes. For enterprise customers, quickly
| being replaced by Sonnet as a default.
| keyle wrote:
| Thank you for high effort response!
|
| I would never use Copilot for anything useful, but I do use
| OpenAI products.
|
| It doesn't matter when you use something else wholesale under
| the covers, if you botch the token spent...
| p_ing wrote:
| Token expenditure isn't a concern for Copilot users. They
| don't see that form of cost model, just a flat monthly (or
| yearly) price for a user license.
| keyle wrote:
| Exactly, and how do you think it's rigged in the setup?
| You're not getting top tier OpenAI service with Copilot
| was my point.
| p_ing wrote:
| Microsoft runs the model, not OAI.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| This is a drop-in database analysis tool and nobody knows it.
| Most Excel users are using Excel as a half-baked database instead
| of as a spreadsheet.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| I have been waiting for this moment. Whatever AI vendor
| establishes a strong beachhead in being competent at Excel is
| going to do _extremely_ well.
|
| Microsoft, being Microsoft, will find a way to win no matter who
| that vendor ends up being.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I remembered this post from (only) 3 years ago:
|
| Show HN: I've built a C# IDE, Runtime, and AppStore inside Excel
|
| 670 points | 179 comments
|
| One of the main use cases was to analyze Excel data with SQL. I'm
| the kind of nerd that loves stuff like that, but stuff like that
| seems completely obsolete now.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34516366
| airstrike wrote:
| This is quite cool, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.
|
| Building an agent that can securely access systems of records,
| external data sources, and other files in your workspace--with
| context for the work you do _outside_ of Excel--is where the
| revolution is at.
| angadsg wrote:
| Hi everyone, engineer on ChatGPT for Excel here - we launched
| ChatGPT for Excel to bring the power of GPT-5.4 to Excel. Keen to
| hear feedback and happy to answer any questions!
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| How well does this work compared with using GPT-5.4 in
| Nicopreme's Pi for Excel?
| howdareme9 wrote:
| have you got a link to this?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Sorry, I got the author wrong.
|
| It's here: https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel
| e38383 wrote:
| I probably could find some really useful things for it to help
| me ... but all software nowadays only works outside my earth
| region :(
|
| This time even for pro.
| carderne wrote:
| What API/approach does it use to edit sheets?
|
| I made a CLI (+skill) so agents could edit files with verbs
| like `insert A1:A3 '[1,2,3]'`, but did some evals and found it
| underperformed Anthropic's approach (just write Python).
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've had a spreadsheet integrated with ChatGPT API for a few
| years already. It really was not until GPT-5.4 that the models
| were able to actually be useful.
|
| What is the data model that you use for the spreadsheet itself?
| I found I could create a chat completion persona that believed
| it is one of the developers of a popular open source
| spreadsheet, and I put this "agent" directly inside the open
| source spreadsheet. I did this before tool calling was
| available at all, so I made my own system for that, and the
| "tools" are the API of that open source spreadsheet. My
| agent(s) that operate like this can do anything the spreadsheet
| can do, including operate the spreadsheet engine from the
| inside.
| hazelnut wrote:
| Do you also have Google Spreadsheets on your radar?
| bewal416 wrote:
| Thanks, but wake me up when there's an actually good AI embedded
| directly in Google Sheets
| mynameisneely wrote:
| The interesting question isn't whether ChatGPT can do Excel. It's
| whether general-purpose AI beats role-specific AI for serious
| work. I'm building in marketing and the pattern I keep running
| into is that the blank canvas of ChatGPT is actually the problem
| for most people, not the solution. Analysts, marketers, ops folks
| don't want a chat interface. They want something that already
| knows the shape of their job. Horizontal tools win demos.
| Vertical tools win retention. My bet is the Excel crowd ends up
| somewhere closer to Rows or Equals than to a chat sidebar, but I
| could be wrong.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Speaking of which... The corporate world, which was already,
| since forever, producing Powerpoint presentations containing
| bogus numbers from buggy spreadsheet (I've been tasked once to
| port a corporate spreadsheet to a dedicated internal app and I
| then understood decisions in the world were taken, everywhere,
| based on bogus numbers from broken reports made by spreadsheets
| full of broken numbers/assumptions) is now going full-speed
| ahead: many vendors have added "Artificial 'Intelligence'" to
| their corporate tools and...
|
| There are now just even more errors than there already were.
|
| Now there's hope though: I take it at some point, just like we
| have AI that can already find (and fix and sometimes even
| properly fix) errors in code, we may end up with AI tools able to
| find all the broken assumptions and errors / wrong formulas the
| spreadsheets that make the corporate world are full of. But atm
| that's not where we are.
|
| One such corporate-world company producing a gigantic turd would
| the "biggest" (but it's really not that big) european software
| company, SAP... They're going full on "business AI" as they see
| (rightly so?) AI as a terminal death threat to their revenue
| model. Market cap went from $360 bn to $200 bn: don't know if
| it's related to their "genius" AI-move.
|
| And so now we have countless corporate drones who were already
| incapable of doing any kind of financial/accounting/math
| computation in a rigorous way who are now double-speeding on the
| errors, but this time AI-augmented.
|
| It's the "let's add an AI chatbot to our site" (which so many
| companies are adding to their websites right now), but corporate
| version: _" let's add AI to our corporate tools"_.
|
| Just to be clear: I think this cannot fail. Failure and bogus
| numbers are the norm in spreadsheets, not the exception. More
| failure, more bogus computations, actually won't change a thing.
| arjie wrote:
| I've always found it unbelievable how bad Gemini's Google Sheets
| interaction is. Copying the sheets into Claude and then modifying
| them there and copying them back actually outperforms it.
|
| Nowadays I just make single-purpose websites with Claude Code
| because Google Sheets has such poor AI integration and is
| outrageously tedious to edit.
|
| They had all the parts and I have a subscription and it still
| does terrible things like prompt me to use pandas after exporting
| as a CSV. It will mention some cell and then can't read it. It
| can't edit tables so they just get overwritten with other tables
| it generates.
|
| It reminds me of something a friend told me: he heard that Google
| employees do dogfood their products; some even multiple times
| every year. There's no way anyone internal uses Sheets even that
| often.
| killerdhmo wrote:
| I mean, you're wrong. As a Xoogler, everything was in Sheets.
| Our roadmap was in Sheets. It's more they don't care.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I love Sheets, but I dont care for using Gemini to interact
| with Sheets. It seems like a recipe for disaster. Do I really
| want it to muck around with thousands of rows and no intuitive
| way to diff its changes? Nope, sticking with basic Sheets
| buccal wrote:
| You should try MS Copilot which uses open source Python
| libraries to interact with Office file formats.
|
| The libraries themselves are OK, but MS uses them stupidly. If
| you want to fill out some form in DOCX or XSLX format you will
| get broken formatting. And this is from Office company.
| devmor wrote:
| I recently experimented with trying to generate a passable
| slide deck from a script and outline I had written
| beforehand. The ChatGPT integration built into Powerpoint was
| abysmally bad. Like to the point it was embarrassing as a
| product.
|
| Claude one-shot something with a Python script that was
| pretty okay.
| darkwater wrote:
| Obviously. Because they didn't train the model on proprietary
| MS code. Which is bad but also good in some way, as it might
| force MS to support better their formats in the open source
| world.
| charlieflowers wrote:
| I'm having great luck having Claude Code generate, read, and
| update spreadsheets by writing Python code that uses gspread.
| VadimPR wrote:
| Can it work with comments in sheets as well? When I looked
| into it, that seemed like a limitation.
| speleding wrote:
| It also works fine with Ruby and the "caxlsx" gem. Codex
| works fine with it as also.
| arjie wrote:
| Surprisingly even small models can do this quite well. I have
| Sonnet on a claw-like generate something based on my emails,
| airbnb receipts, and so on, and it was perfect and it could
| edit fields and whatnot, but the Gemini tool can't do
| anything.
| yabutlivnWoods wrote:
| My local models interact with Sheets exclusively over the API
| with Python scripts I been curating for years
|
| Given how well the API works, that we are discussing Googlers,
| my guess is that's how they dog food their services.
| Programmers don't get hired by Google for mouse skills.
|
| The GUI is for spot checking results, final presentation.
|
| If you're sitting there point-n-clicking everything into place
| perhaps consider you are doing it wrong.
| beepdyboop wrote:
| That sounds like an extremely narrow use case, compared to
| what the vast majority of Sheets users will be comfortable
| with
| mbreese wrote:
| At the same time, it makes some sense... the programmers
| for a system aren't always the best users of a system. So
| if you're expecting them to dogfood their own system
| (Google Sheets), you might find that they test/interact
| with the system primarily through the API and not the GUI.
|
| I have no idea if they do or not, but it's a plausible
| explanation...
| yabutlivnWoods wrote:
| Use case feels like the wrong term.
|
| Do you mean restricted workflow? Googles APIs are pretty
| much 1:1 to the GUI
|
| And using Python makes it trivial to copy-paste out of
| files and other APIs with one run of Python
|
| Versus all the fiddling in browser tabs with a mouse, it
| actually affords an incredibly wide set of options to
| quickly collate and format data
| intended wrote:
| How? This argument would make sense if sheets _wasn't_
| targeted at a general audience.
| dminik wrote:
| Yeah, the Sheets integration is weird. It's usually ok when it
| wants to place something down the first time. But then it seems
| incapable of making any changes to it. Or even acknowledging
| the data in the sheet. What's up with that?
| bdcravens wrote:
| I tried it the other day to work on some exported CSVs when
| doing my taxes. I was finally able to get it to do what I
| wanted, but it was definitely an exercise, feeling like I was
| talking to Chat GPT from a couple of years ago. (as in a really
| smart but easily distracted and confused child)
| nunez wrote:
| Agreed; I was also shocked by how limited it was. Same with the
| Slides integration.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Does a highly performant XLSX tool exist? I want to be able to
| open a 500k row, 60+ column table in Excel and manipulate it at
| 60+ FPS. Zero lag. I feel like Excel has never - ahem - excelled
| in this department. Libreoffice comes close and I enjoy it on
| Linux, but on my M2 Macbook Air it struggles.
| rpearl wrote:
| Try https://rowzero.com ? We have written a much faster
| spreadsheet engine and regularly work with 10M+ row datasets
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It seems to not be available in EU, possibly due to regulations.
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| FAQ: Is it available worldwide? A: Yes. (...) outside the EU.
|
| So, yes but no. Not that I care, but the answer to the above
| question is a no, and should start with No.
| tills13 wrote:
| These AI in Excel products are a financial crisis waiting to
| happen. Or maybe just Enron but stupider.
| flexie wrote:
| Do anyone here know if OpenAI plans on introducing a Word add-in,
| like Claude for Word?
| Instagraf wrote:
| Nice addition for get my head around those narley formulas ...
| and without having to jump out of the Sheet.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Follow along so you can trust the work
|
| > (...) you can verify each step and revert edits if needed.
|
| I wish there were different workflows.
|
| It feels like current most popular way of working with GenAI
| requires the operator to perform significant QA. The net time
| savings are usually positive. But it still feels inefficient,
| risky and frustrating, especially with more complex and/or niche
| problem areas.
|
| Are there GenAI products that focus more on skill enhancement
| than replacement? Or any other workflows that improve
| reliability?
| linzhangrun wrote:
| This should have been implemented when Microsoft launched Copilot
| two years ago. Instead, they'd rather hijack the right Ctrl on
| every computer than do this.
| mentalgear wrote:
| More like ChatGPT for Claude for Excel .
| kbos87 wrote:
| From time to time I've tried using ChatGPT for financial
| modeling, and I have to say my experiences don't inspire much
| confidence.
|
| Just this past week I used it to generate a simple model of a few
| different scenarios related to an investment property I own.
|
| The first problem I ran into is that it was unable to output a
| downloadable XLS file. Not a huge deal - it suggested generating
| CSV tables I could copy/paste into a spreadsheet. The outputs it
| gave me included commas in a handful of numbers over 1,000 (but
| not all of them!) which of course shifted cells around when
| brought into Google Sheets. We pivoted our approach to TSV and
| solved this problem. Big deal? No. Seemingly basic oversight?
| Absolutely.
|
| This is where the real fun began. Once I started to scrutinize
| and understand the model it built, I found incorrect references
| buried all over the place, some of which would have been
| extremely hard to spot. Here's my actual exchange with ChatGPT:
|
| - - - - - - - - - -
|
| > Can you check the reference in cell F3? It looks like it's
| calling back to the wrong cell on the inputs tab. Are there
| similarly incorrect references elsewhere?
|
| > Yes, F3 is incorrect, and there are multiple other incorrect
| references elsewhere: (It listed about 30 bulleted incorrect
| references)
|
| Bottom line - - Many formulas point to the wrong Inputs row
| because of the blank lines - The Sell + Condo section also has a
| structural design problem, not just bad references.
|
| The cleanest fix is for me to regenerate the entire AnnualModel
| TSV with: - all references corrected - all 15 years included -
| the condo scenario modeled properly with a separate housing asset
| column
|
| - - - - - - - - - -
|
| This was me asking about the exact output I had just received
| (not something I had made any changes to or reworked.)
|
| There are plenty of domains where I have enough faith and error
| tolerance to use ChatGPT all day, but this just sends a chill
| down my spine. How many users are really going to proof every
| single formula? And if I need to scrutinize to that level of
| detail, what's the point in the first place?
| chux52 wrote:
| How do the OpenAI models/reasoning effort map to Fast, Standard,
| Heavy in the add-in?
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| On this episode of "chatgpt just killed my startup"
|
| Tune in for the next episode: Word
| Aboutplants wrote:
| Word was the first thing killed
| dirasieb wrote:
| doesn't seem to be available for excel on macOS, disappointing
| dueltmp_yufsy wrote:
| I already use AI to help recall the various macros. I think this
| is a great use case for real world impact of AI. So many jobs
| still rely on Excel as central facet of analysis. I'm looking
| forward to trying it myself.
| ozgurds wrote:
| We were already using AI in excel but manuallay copy pasting the
| macros and doing the things by ourselves. This will make us save
| really much time. When you have automated macros it is really fun
| to deal with excels.
| tboughen wrote:
| I am a ChatGPT plus user in the UK. I believe this should work
| for me as I am outside the EU (!), but every time I have tried it
| I get 'Currently Unavailable - please try again later'. Which is
| very unhelpful.
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