What surprised me was that it works with oauth tokens from consumer AI subscriptions, and even free ones like Antigravity. Some of this is inherited from pi, but the author did some extra work to build a proxy to allow auth to work even from within the Excel sidebar.

I'm not sure how it works and what the role of the backend is. But I hope to test it side by side with 'Claude for Excel', which I also happened to install today.

(I tried both on something basic just to check they were installed correctly.)

I’m a heavy Excel user and would love to try this, but I’m on Linux, so I can use only the online version of Excel.

It’s got various things to clean up but the idea is to bring the spirit of pi (an OSS coding agent that can extend itself and gives you maximal freedom) to excel.

So it has things that claude for excel will never have - like tmux, the ability to use any model provider that works with pi, and of course extensions

built in lets you play snake while your agent works; I added some personal ones for slash commands, auto-pulling fx, ..

And nice touches like user and file agents.md

still quite a lot of work I need to juggle with my new job, but I’ve been using it all week with decent results

We took an Elm app from our web app and put into Excel to control downloading reports. Works great.

Except you have to side load this and that is a pain - or you have to go through the MS App Store, which is a whole other headache.

If anyone has any advice on making it easy for customers to install Office apps please let me know.

For example, “build a Gantt chart base on … and suggest a the best layout for the data to drive the chart.”

Gets me no where with copilot but it always just wants to answer questions about my data which isn’t helpful to me.