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!
ChatGPT for Excel
61–70 of 209 posts
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 al…
I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
You mean like, double-click?
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#63This 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 Pow…
> 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 al…
you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated slides as a medium for anything, but i've been proven wrong tine and again that people love their pp.
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#64This 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 Pow…
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 nati…
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.
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
You mean like, double-click?
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.
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#66Microsoft 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.
> 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.
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.
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 )). What do you mean with a "OM" call? And why are they especially costl…
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 latenc…
Does Excel for Web still spin up an actual copy of Excel.exe on a machine somewhere? I heard that is how the initial version worked.
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#68In 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 Ex…
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.
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#69Thanks, but wake me up when there's an actually good AI embedded directly in Google Sheets
Re: ChatGPT for Excel
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 al…
I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
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.