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ChatGPT for Excel

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Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#51

Post by p_ing »

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…

Cheaper to get M365 Copilot licenses for the Claude models in Excel.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#52

Post by _doctor_love »

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.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#53

Post by mritchie712 »

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

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#55

Post by Acmeon »

strongpigeon wrote: post #30
Acmeon wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Yeah, that makes sense. For some reason, I was under the impression that all calculations run locally in the browser, which would have been comparable to how Excel desktop works (i.e., local calculations). Is there a reason for why the Excel calculations run on the server (e.g., excessive workload of a browser implementation, proprietary code, difficult to implement in JavaScript, cross browser compatibility issues, etc.)? Furthermore, if the reason for this architecture is (or was) limitations in JavaScript or browsers, do you find it plausible that the Excel calculations will some day be implemented in Webassembly?

Regardless, I have always preferred Excel desktop over Excel web (and other web based spreadsheet alternatives). This information makes me somewhat less interested in Excel web. Nonetheless, I find Excel Add-Ins useful, primarily because they bring the capabilities of JavaScript to Excel.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#56

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

strongpigeon wrote: post #30
Acmeon wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

> though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have changed since.

Honestly, I struggle to think about what has actually changed between Office 2013 and Office 2024 (and their Office 365 equivalents); I know the LAMBDA function was a big deal, but they made the UI objectively worse by wasting screen-space with ever-increasingly phatter non-touch UI elements; and the Python announcement was huge... before deflating like a popped party balloon when we learned how horribly compromised it was.

...but other than that, Excel remains exactly as frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a date string - today just as it was 15 years ago[1].

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4896116/parsing-an-iso86...

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#57

Post by d3Xt3r »

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 all you need is a browser.

PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#58

Post by keyle »

p_ing wrote: post #45
keyle wrote: post #42

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

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.

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...

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#59

Post by jason_zig »

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'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#60

Post by airstrike »

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.

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