8 ms·

ChatGPT for Excel

341 points by armcat 6mo ago

haneul 6mo ago
Except for pro and plus users in the EU eh…
flybrand 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  its baffling how badly microsoft has handled copilot, this is exactly what copilot in office should have been
- miohtama 6mo ago
  It's called Microslop for a reason.
- ebbi 6mo ago
  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.
  - watsonL1F7 6mo ago
    [dead]
- evanjrowley 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    A recent funny story on this topic: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
  - mohamedkoubaa 6mo ago
    Microsoft is better off not allowing copilot basic because of the reputational harm it will do. Not that they are thinking through copilot rationally
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - basch 6mo ago
      it was a good name when chosen. too bad they have burned bob, clippy, cortana, sydney, and copilot already.
      - alternatex 6mo ago
        The backend of Copilot is still called Sydney AFAIK
      - compass_copium 6mo ago
        Don't forget Tay!
- Handy-Man 6mo ago
  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.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- LuxBennu 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
    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.
  - phyalow 6mo ago
    [flagged]
- nsiemsen 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    Cheaper to get M365 Copilot licenses for the Claude models in Excel.
    - WillAdams 6mo ago
      What are the costs on that? Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?
      - p_ing 6mo ago
        $200-something per user per year. Will vary based on license type and seat count. No limits.
        croes 6mo ago
        > No limits. Yet.
        codeugo 6mo ago
        lol
        mastermage 6mo ago
        Well other than the limits of Copilots usefullness.
    - jxmesth 6mo ago
- d3Xt3r 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
    I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
    - raincole 6mo ago
      You mean like, double-click?
      - apsurd 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
        The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully self-contained, no network access is needed.
        apsurd 6mo ago
        that's pretty cool!
    - DrSAR 6mo ago
      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.
- vessenes 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    stride.microsoft.com -> microsoft has this stuff you just don’t know it unless you are an M365 power user
    - compass_copium 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        Enterprise is Copilot Cowork one of the frontier agents. Has to be enabled by your organization I believe
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- Gareth321 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  > 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-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-openai-pa...
- ryanjshaw 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  stride.microsoft.com is the cowork equivalent I believe.
  - p_ing 6mo ago
    Only for personal accounts. Enterprise customers have a Frontier agent called Copilot Cowork via the M365 Copilot app.... copilot.
- xeyownt 6mo ago
  it would be bad for Microsoft if that would use Calc on LibreOffice.
- giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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-benefits-to-ai-models-that-are-months-behind.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-bene...
  - leetharris 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  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.
  - HongKongPhooey 6mo ago
    I recall reading comments like this when PowerPoint was invented as it would kill all graphic design jobs. The absolute reverse happened. It created an entirely new industry. There is no AI today, or in the near future, that can combine human emotive story telling with impactful design, animated flow and interactivity. Yes it can create flattened boring 'documents' with no passion or depth. I for one would never want to be asked to stand in front of an audience and actually have to present a deck created by Copilot or Claude. Feast your eyes on this PowerPoint creation made by very talented real human designers and ask yourself the question "How long before AI can do this?" https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partnership-highlights/ https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partners...
    - brookst 6mo ago
      Wait, how does PowerPoint do emotive storytelling in a way that a human driving an AI tool could not? It sounds like you’re confusing my argument that AI can replace PowerPoint tools like gradient, layers, fonts, etc, with an argument I did not make that AI will take humans out of the equation.
- bko 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      > 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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
- thesuperevil 6mo ago
  That’s right lol
sayYayToLife 6mo ago
[dead]
TrackerFF 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    Gemini is very good with SVG, but I don't really see the similarity to spreadsheets.
  - brett-jackson 6mo ago
    I’d try asking it for a mermaid diagram. I think ChatGPT’s web interface will render them.
  - bob1029 6mo ago
    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.
orliesaurus 6mo ago
Next do one for PowerPoint and Outlook
w2df 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  saltman look so desperate. meanwhile not that ant is genius, except the timing of dow drama right before Iran war.
- tokioyoyo 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
w2df 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  I know the firm - it's RenTech.
  - w2df 6mo ago
    nah the firm in question has much higher AUM.
    - brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
      Citadel
- 6mo ago
HerbManic 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    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.
lgq 6mo ago
[dead]
1970-01-01 6mo ago
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.
Acmeon 6mo ago
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?tab=Overview 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.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- p_ing 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
  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.
  - 6mo ago
_pdp_ 6mo ago
Why though? What is the point of this? I thought they are building towards an AGI.
keyle 6mo ago
Copilot is so bad that chatGPT is offered to replace it. [for] ... users outside the EU. hmm
- p_ing 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
        Microsoft runs the model, not OAI.
_doctor_love 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34516366
airstrike 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  How well does this work compared with using GPT-5.4 in Nicopreme’s Pi for Excel?
  - howdareme9 6mo ago
    have you got a link to this?
    - rahimnathwani 6mo ago
      Sorry, I got the author wrong. It's here: https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel
- e38383 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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.
bewal416 6mo ago
Thanks, but wake me up when there's an actually good AI embedded directly in Google Sheets
mynameisneely 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  I mean, you're wrong. As a Xoogler, everything was in Sheets. Our roadmap was in Sheets. It's more they don't care.
  - renewiltord 6mo ago
    This combined with the other guy saying they use Sheets through the API really makes for some of the funniest imagery. “Dave, did you finish that ticket to make the button blue?” “Oh yeah, mate, give me a second to just whip up a script and set that task to complete. Do you remember if it was B729 or C624 that I should change?” “It’s B729. But change the script to use ‘completed’ all right?” “Yeah, give me a minute. Just need to spin up a Google project and activate the Sheets API (New). Now let me just get credentials. Got it. Yeah, now let me get Gemini to fix up the script. All right. Looking good. Shall I run it?” “Yeah, lgtm” “Done” “Good process, guys. Velocity is at an all time high. Cell B729 is set to ‘completed’ as we planned.”
- AznHisoka 6mo ago
  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
- 6mo ago
whalesalad 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  Try https://rowzero.com https://rowzero.com ? We have written a much faster spreadsheet engine and regularly work with 10M+ row datasets
DeathArrow 6mo ago
It seems to not be available in EU, possibly due to regulations.
Bishonen88 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
These AI in Excel products are a financial crisis waiting to happen. Or maybe just Enron but stupider.
flexie 6mo ago
Do anyone here know if OpenAI plans on introducing a Word add-in, like Claude for Word?
Instagraf 6mo ago
Nice addition for get my head around those narley formulas ... and without having to jump out of the Sheet.
thih9 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
[flagged]
mentalgear 6mo ago
More like ChatGPT for Claude for Excel .
gauravsc 6mo ago
[flagged]
kbos87 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
How do the OpenAI models/reasoning effort map to Fast, Standard, Heavy in the add-in?
dangoodmanUT 6mo ago
On this episode of "chatgpt just killed my startup" Tune in for the next episode: Word
- Aboutplants 6mo ago
  Word was the first thing killed
dirasieb 6mo ago
doesn't seem to be available for excel on macOS, disappointing
dueltmp_yufsy 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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.
thesuperevil 6mo ago
Oh that would be great

341 points by armcat 6mo ago

Except for pro and plus users in the EU eh…

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
its baffling how badly microsoft has handled copilot, this is exactly what copilot in office should have been
miohtama 6mo ago
It's called Microslop for a reason.
ebbi 6mo ago
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.
- watsonL1F7 6mo ago
  [dead]
evanjrowley 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  A recent funny story on this topic: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
- mohamedkoubaa 6mo ago
  Microsoft is better off not allowing copilot basic because of the reputational harm it will do. Not that they are thinking through copilot rationally
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - basch 6mo ago
    it was a good name when chosen. too bad they have burned bob, clippy, cortana, sydney, and copilot already.
    - alternatex 6mo ago
      The backend of Copilot is still called Sydney AFAIK
    - compass_copium 6mo ago
      Don't forget Tay!
Handy-Man 6mo ago
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.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
LuxBennu 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  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.
- phyalow 6mo ago
  [flagged]
nsiemsen 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  Cheaper to get M365 Copilot licenses for the Claude models in Excel.
  - WillAdams 6mo ago
    What are the costs on that? Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?
    - p_ing 6mo ago
      $200-something per user per year. Will vary based on license type and seat count. No limits.
      - croes 6mo ago
        > No limits. Yet.
        codeugo 6mo ago
        lol
      - mastermage 6mo ago
        Well other than the limits of Copilots usefullness.
  - jxmesth 6mo ago
d3Xt3r 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
  I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
  - raincole 6mo ago
    You mean like, double-click?
    - apsurd 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully self-contained, no network access is needed.
        apsurd 6mo ago
        that's pretty cool!
  - DrSAR 6mo ago
    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.
vessenes 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  stride.microsoft.com -> microsoft has this stuff you just don’t know it unless you are an M365 power user
  - compass_copium 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      Enterprise is Copilot Cowork one of the frontier agents. Has to be enabled by your organization I believe
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
Gareth321 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
> 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-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-openai-pa...
ryanjshaw 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
stride.microsoft.com is the cowork equivalent I believe.
- p_ing 6mo ago
  Only for personal accounts. Enterprise customers have a Frontier agent called Copilot Cowork via the M365 Copilot app.... copilot.
xeyownt 6mo ago
it would be bad for Microsoft if that would use Calc on LibreOffice.
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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-benefits-to-ai-models-that-are-months-behind.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-bene...
- leetharris 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
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.
- HongKongPhooey 6mo ago
  I recall reading comments like this when PowerPoint was invented as it would kill all graphic design jobs. The absolute reverse happened. It created an entirely new industry. There is no AI today, or in the near future, that can combine human emotive story telling with impactful design, animated flow and interactivity. Yes it can create flattened boring 'documents' with no passion or depth. I for one would never want to be asked to stand in front of an audience and actually have to present a deck created by Copilot or Claude. Feast your eyes on this PowerPoint creation made by very talented real human designers and ask yourself the question "How long before AI can do this?" https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partnership-highlights/ https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partners...
  - brookst 6mo ago
    Wait, how does PowerPoint do emotive storytelling in a way that a human driving an AI tool could not? It sounds like you’re confusing my argument that AI can replace PowerPoint tools like gradient, layers, fonts, etc, with an argument I did not make that AI will take humans out of the equation.
bko 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    > 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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
thesuperevil 6mo ago
That’s right lol

sayYayToLife 6mo ago

[dead]

TrackerFF 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  Gemini is very good with SVG, but I don't really see the similarity to spreadsheets.
- brett-jackson 6mo ago
  I’d try asking it for a mermaid diagram. I think ChatGPT’s web interface will render them.
- bob1029 6mo ago
  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.

orliesaurus 6mo ago

Next do one for PowerPoint and Outlook

w2df 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
saltman look so desperate. meanwhile not that ant is genius, except the timing of dow drama right before Iran war.
tokioyoyo 6mo ago
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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago

w2df 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
I know the firm - it's RenTech.
- w2df 6mo ago
  nah the firm in question has much higher AUM.
  - brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
    Citadel
6mo ago

HerbManic 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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.

lgq 6mo ago

[dead]

1970-01-01 6mo ago

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.

Acmeon 6mo ago

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?tab=Overview 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.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
p_ing 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
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.
- 6mo ago

_pdp_ 6mo ago

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

keyle 6mo ago

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

p_ing 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        Microsoft runs the model, not OAI.

_doctor_love 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34516366

airstrike 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
How well does this work compared with using GPT-5.4 in Nicopreme’s Pi for Excel?
- howdareme9 6mo ago
  have you got a link to this?
  - rahimnathwani 6mo ago
    Sorry, I got the author wrong. It's here: https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel
e38383 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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.

bewal416 6mo ago

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

mynameisneely 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
I mean, you're wrong. As a Xoogler, everything was in Sheets. Our roadmap was in Sheets. It's more they don't care.
- renewiltord 6mo ago
  This combined with the other guy saying they use Sheets through the API really makes for some of the funniest imagery. “Dave, did you finish that ticket to make the button blue?” “Oh yeah, mate, give me a second to just whip up a script and set that task to complete. Do you remember if it was B729 or C624 that I should change?” “It’s B729. But change the script to use ‘completed’ all right?” “Yeah, give me a minute. Just need to spin up a Google project and activate the Sheets API (New). Now let me just get credentials. Got it. Yeah, now let me get Gemini to fix up the script. All right. Looking good. Shall I run it?” “Yeah, lgtm” “Done” “Good process, guys. Velocity is at an all time high. Cell B729 is set to ‘completed’ as we planned.”
AznHisoka 6mo ago
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
6mo ago

whalesalad 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
Try https://rowzero.com https://rowzero.com ? We have written a much faster spreadsheet engine and regularly work with 10M+ row datasets

DeathArrow 6mo ago

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

Bishonen88 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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

flexie 6mo ago

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

Instagraf 6mo ago

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

thih9 6mo ago

> 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 6mo ago

[flagged]

mentalgear 6mo ago

More like ChatGPT for Claude for Excel .

gauravsc 6mo ago

[flagged]

kbos87 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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

dangoodmanUT 6mo ago

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

Aboutplants 6mo ago
Word was the first thing killed

dirasieb 6mo ago

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

dueltmp_yufsy 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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.

thesuperevil 6mo ago

Oh that would be great