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ChatGPT for Excel

329 points by armcat

by strongpigeon

1 subcomments

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).

by lateforwork

23 subcomments

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.

by angadsg

5 subcomments

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!

by arjie

8 subcomments

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.

by TrackerFF

2 subcomments

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.

by Acmeon

3 subcomments

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.

by flybrand

0 subcomment

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.

by w2df

2 subcomments

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.

by tboughen

0 subcomment

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.

by HerbManic

1 subcomments

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.

by tills13

0 subcomment

These AI in Excel products are a financial crisis waiting to happen. Or maybe just Enron but stupider.

by p_ing

1 subcomments

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.

by thih9

0 subcomment

> 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?

by linzhangrun

0 subcomment

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.

by dueltmp_yufsy

0 subcomment

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.

by ozgurds

0 subcomment

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.

by kbos87

0 subcomment

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?

by mritchie712

0 subcomment

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

by dangoodmanUT

1 subcomments

On this episode of "chatgpt just killed my startup"
Tune in for the next episode: Word

by airstrike

0 subcomment

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.

by mynameisneely

0 subcomment

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.

by chux52

0 subcomment

How do the OpenAI models/reasoning effort map to Fast, Standard, Heavy in the add-in?

by 1970-01-01

0 subcomment

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.

by thesuperevil

0 subcomment

Oh that would be great

by Instagraf

0 subcomment

Nice addition for get my head around those narley formulas ... and without having to jump out of the Sheet.

by flexie

0 subcomment

Do anyone here know if OpenAI plans on introducing a Word add-in, like Claude for Word?

by keyle

1 subcomments

Copilot is so bad that chatGPT is offered to replace it.
```
    [for] ... users outside the EU.
```
hmm

by _doctor_love

0 subcomment

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.

by mentalgear

0 subcomment

More like ChatGPT for Claude for Excel .

by orliesaurus

0 subcomment

Next do one for PowerPoint and Outlook

by Bishonen88

0 subcomment

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.

by DeathArrow

0 subcomment

It seems to not be available in EU, possibly due to regulations.

by whalesalad

1 subcomments

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.

by TacticalCoder

0 subcomment

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.

by bewal416

0 subcomment

Thanks, but wake me up when there's an actually good AI embedded directly in Google Sheets

by _pdp_

0 subcomment

Why though? What is the point of this? I thought they are building towards an AGI.

by haneul

0 subcomment

Except for pro and plus users in the EU eh…

by dirasieb

0 subcomment

doesn't seem to be available for excel on macOS, disappointing

by lgq

0 subcomment

[dead]

by sayYayToLife

0 subcomment

[dead]

by gauravsc

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by w2df

4 subcomments

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.