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Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel

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Re: Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel

#5

Post by jweir »

Something, well may things, kill about Microsoft. The Office suite have a wonderful API and loading a JS app with an an interface in the apps works great.

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

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

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

Re: Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel

#6

Post by rahimnathwani »

I saw this today on X. It's built on top of the pi coding agent (same one used by openclaw). It uses pi-web-ui ( https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages%2Fweb...).

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

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

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

Re: Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel

#8

Post by tmustier »

I’m building it

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

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

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

And nice touches like user and file agents.md

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

Re: Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel

#9

Post by cygnusmove »

jweir wrote: post #5

Something, well may things, kill about Microsoft. The Office suite have a wonderful API and loading a JS app with an an interface in the apps works great. We took an Elm app from our web app and put into Excel to control downloading reports. Works great. Except you have to side load this and that is a pain - or you have to go through the MS App Store, which is a whole other headache. If anyone has any advice on makin…

If your customers are in the same Microsoft tenant as you (i.e., company employees), you can use Integrated Apps to deploy the add-ins to them.

1. Host the add-in static assets at some endpoint

2. Ask your IT admin to upload your add-in manifest file to Integrated Apps

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage...

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