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ChatGPT for Excel

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Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#121

Post by intended »

nsiemsen wrote: post #49
lateforwork wrote: post #4

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 Pow…

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…

How’s that been in practice ? From what I’ve been following - Claude in finance results in models with errors that an analyst won’t make.

You get models that are formatted and structured and which balance - but there are errors introduced which an analyst / human wouldn’t make.

Stuff like hard coded values, or incorrect cell logic which guarantees the model balances.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#122

Post by e38383 »

angadsg wrote: post #61

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 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.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#123

Post by VadimPR »

charlieflowers wrote: post #108
arjie wrote: post #102

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 thing…

I'm having great luck having Claude Code generate, read, and update spreadsheets by writing Python code that uses gspread.

Can it work with comments in sheets as well? When I looked into it, that seemed like a limitation.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#125

Post by jqbd »

bob1029 wrote: post #31
jannyfer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 over…

Parametric scenes is the whole of Houdini and any node based compositor etc. so there is some applications no?

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#126

Post by darkwater »

buccal wrote: post #106
arjie wrote: post #102

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 thing…

You should try MS Copilot which uses open source Python libraries to interact with Office file formats. The libraries themselves are OK, but MS uses them stupidly. If you want to fill out some form in DOCX or XSLX format you will get broken formatting. And this is from Office company.

Obviously. Because they didn't train the model on proprietary MS code. Which is bad but also good in some way, as it might force MS to support better their formats in the open source world.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#127

Post by thih9 »

> 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?

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#128

Post by d3Xt3r »

basch wrote: post #89
d3Xt3r wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

Or you could just talk to powerpoint, which creates a self contained pptx, which also plays anywhere. we've hit this point where its cool to have claude reinvent every wheel just because it can.

It's not self-contained, it requires PowerPoint to be indfled. Which is not an issue on corporate machines of course, but maybe you want to do a presentation for a general/broader audience.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#129

Post by vipipiccf »

lateforwork wrote: post #4

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 Pow…

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.

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