ChatGPT for Excel

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.

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Copilot is so bad that chatGPT is offered to replace it.

    [for] ... users outside the EU.

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

Next do one for PowerPoint and Outlook

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

Except for pro and plus users in the EU eh…

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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.