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So cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel. Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come from the ability to use AI _as_ a for

So cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel. Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come from the ability to use AI _as_ a formula. For example, =PROMPT("Classify user feedback as positive, neutral or negative", A1). This would enable normal people (non-programmers) to fire off thousands of prompts at once and automate workflows like programmers do (disclaimer: I am the author of Cellm that does exactly this). Combined with Excel's built-in functions for deterministic work, Claude could really kill the whole copy-pasting data in and out of chat windows for bulk-processing data.

starik36 11mo ago
I can't wait until someone does this, then autofills 50k rows down, then gets a $50k bill for all the tokens. Reminds me of when our CIO insisted on moving to the cloud (back when AWS was just getting started) and then was super pissed when he got a $60k bill because no one knew to shutdown their VMs when leaving for the day.
- kaspermarstal 11mo ago
  If someone is processing 50k rows, that means they found real value and the UX is working. That's the whole point. Also, 50k rows wouldn't cost $50k. More like $100 with Sonnet 4.5 pricing and typical numbers of input/output tokens. Imagine the time needed to go through 50k rows manually and math doesn't really work for a horror story.
NotMichaelBay 11mo ago
You may already be aware but Microsoft recently released a COPILOT() function that does this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-5849821b-755d-4030-a38b-9e20be0cbf62 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-...
- kaspermarstal 11mo ago
  Thanks, appreciate it. Indeed, and Anthropic did something similar for Google sheets a year ago. I am dying to know why they decided this should not be part of their excel effort. They obviously put a lot of work and thought into claude for excel so it must be intentional. Anyone from Anthropic here that would like elaborate?

starik36 11mo ago

I can't wait until someone does this, then autofills 50k rows down, then gets a $50k bill for all the tokens. Reminds me of when our CIO insisted on moving to the cloud (back when AWS was just getting started) and then was super pissed when he got a $60k bill because no one knew to shutdown their VMs when leaving for the day.

kaspermarstal 11mo ago
If someone is processing 50k rows, that means they found real value and the UX is working. That's the whole point. Also, 50k rows wouldn't cost $50k. More like $100 with Sonnet 4.5 pricing and typical numbers of input/output tokens. Imagine the time needed to go through 50k rows manually and math doesn't really work for a horror story.

NotMichaelBay 11mo ago

You may already be aware but Microsoft recently released a COPILOT() function that does this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-5849821b-755d-4030-a38b-9e20be0cbf62 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-...

kaspermarstal 11mo ago
Thanks, appreciate it. Indeed, and Anthropic did something similar for Google sheets a year ago. I am dying to know why they decided this should not be part of their excel effort. They obviously put a lot of work and thought into claude for excel so it must be intentional. Anyone from Anthropic here that would like elaborate?