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ChatGPT for Excel

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Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#81

Post by Acmeon »

strongpigeon wrote: post #78
Acmeon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I don’t think Excel web will ever be running the calc engine browser side, no. The only way I could see this happen would be via compiling the core to wasm, which I don’t think is worth the engineering effort. Excel has this legacy (but extremely powerful) core with very few people left that knows all of it. It has legacy bugs preserved for compatibility reasons as whole businesses are ran on spreadsheet that break i…

Thanks for the interesting info! Yeah, maybe Excel web will someday support local calculations via wasm, but for now I think I will stick with Excel desktop with add-ins.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#82

Post by strongpigeon »

com2kid wrote: post #67
strongpigeon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, as the other comment mentioned. But I’ve heard of more than a few customers running their own “server excel workflow” where they have an instances of excel.exe running a VBA macro that talks to a web server (and does some processing).

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#83

Post by mynameisneely »

The interesting question isn't whether ChatGPT can do Excel. It's whether general-purpose AI beats role-specific AI for serious work. I'm building in marketing and the pattern I keep running into is that the blank canvas of ChatGPT is actually the problem for most people, not the solution. Analysts, marketers, ops folks don't want a chat interface. They want something that already knows the shape of their job. Horizontal tools win demos. Vertical tools win retention. My bet is the Excel crowd ends up somewhere closer to Rows or Equals than to a chat sidebar, but I could be wrong.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#84

Post by vessenes »

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…

Microsoft has rights to all this IP. So, it might look bad for their product folks, but for the corporation this is great, to the extent it works.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#85

Post by airstrike »

w2df wrote: post #16

As someone that knows a high-flying portfolio manager who works at a very well known firm that I wont name... I can confidently state these tools are DOA. Ive spoken to them at length about the nature of what these people actually do day-to-day. If you think its just about using excel then you're already way off. They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these people are doing in the job (accounting+corp…

As a former investment banker, I mostly agree. This is probably 10% of the work

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#86

Post by airstrike »

esafak wrote: post #35
w2df wrote: post #16

As someone that knows a high-flying portfolio manager who works at a very well known firm that I wont name... I can confidently state these tools are DOA. Ive spoken to them at length about the nature of what these people actually do day-to-day. If you think its just about using excel then you're already way off. They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these people are doing in the job (accounting+corp…

Why are they irrelevant? You do not say anything.

Because the challenge is in the space between apps, not in the apps themselves.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#87

Post by basch »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #37
evanjrowley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a significant difference in experience between Copilot Basic for a M365 user whose IT admins have blocked integration capabilities with Sharepoint content vs Copilot Premium for a M365 user whose IT admins have allowed integration capabilities with Sharepoint content.

Microsoft is better off not allowing copilot basic because of the reputational harm it will do. Not that they are thinking through copilot rationally

it was a good name when chosen. too bad they have burned bob, clippy, cortana, sydney, and copilot already.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#88

Post by TacticalCoder »

Speaking of which... The corporate world, which was already, since forever, producing Powerpoint presentations containing bogus numbers from buggy spreadsheet (I've been tasked once to port a corporate spreadsheet to a dedicated internal app and I then understood decisions in the world were taken, everywhere, based on bogus numbers from broken reports made by spreadsheets full of broken numbers/assumptions) is now going full-speed ahead: many vendors have added "Artificial 'Intelligence'" to their corporate tools and...

There are now just even more errors than there already were.

Now there's hope though: I take it at some point, just like we have AI that can already find (and fix and sometimes even properly fix) errors in code, we may end up with AI tools able to find all the broken assumptions and errors / wrong formulas the spreadsheets that make the corporate world are full of. But atm that's not where we are.

One such corporate-world company producing a gigantic turd would the "biggest" (but it's really not that big) european software company, SAP... They're going full on "business AI" as they see (rightly so?) AI as a terminal death threat to their revenue model. Market cap went from $360 bn to $200 bn: don't know if it's related to their "genius" AI-move.

And so now we have countless corporate drones who were already incapable of doing any kind of financial/accounting/math computation in a rigorous way who are now double-speeding on the errors, but this time AI-augmented.

It's the "let's add an AI chatbot to our site" (which so many companies are adding to their websites right now), but corporate version: "let's add AI to our corporate tools".

Just to be clear: I think this cannot fail. Failure and bogus numbers are the norm in spreadsheets, not the exception. More failure, more bogus computations, actually won't change a thing.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#89

Post by basch »

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…

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.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#90

Post by d3Xt3r »

apsurd wrote: post #65
raincole wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully self-contained, no network access is needed.
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