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ChatGPT for Excel

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Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#151

Post by chris_money202 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #141
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…

> 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.

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.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#152

Post by chris_money202 »

vipipiccf wrote: post #129
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 dist…

stride.microsoft.com -> microsoft has this stuff you just don’t know it unless you are an M365 power user

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#153

Post by xeyownt »

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…

it would be bad for Microsoft if that would use Calc on LibreOffice.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#154

Post by kbos87 »

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?

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#155

Post by balderdash »

intended wrote: post #121
nsiemsen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just my experience, it’s not a solution but rather a productivity tool. I mostly use it for tasks I can do myself but it would probably take 20-30min to dial in - now Claude can do it in 2-3min. (E.g. in a data table - add a new column that checks column a if the data is a, do x, if the data is b, do y, if the data is c, do z - then combine that with the word after the hyphen in column b —- or another example —- create a new sheet that is the same format as sheet one but show calculates the difference between column a and b bot for sheets 1-12 in a summary)

I don’t get good results when I just have Claude build things on its own - but for these types of specific productivity tasks I can save a couple of hours here and there.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#156

Post by speleding »

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.

It also works fine with Ruby and the "caxlsx" gem. Codex works fine with it as also.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#157

Post by usrme »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #57
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 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'd love to get a link to that comment/post!

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#158

Post by bsenftner »

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'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.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#160

Post by p_ing »

Avicebron wrote: post #101
p_ing wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct.

{EDIT} English and or the concept of written word may be foreign to you. Thank you for your assistance.

Not sure why you'd state that. 'Correct' is a grammatically correct and complete sentence to your question.
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