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ChatGPT for Excel

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Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#91

Post by keyle »

p_ing wrote: post #74
keyle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Token expenditure isn't a concern for Copilot users. They don't see that form of cost model, just a flat monthly (or yearly) price for a user license.

Exactly, and how do you think it's rigged in the setup? You're not getting top tier OpenAI service with Copilot was my point.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#92

Post by WillAdams »

p_ing wrote: post #51
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…

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

What are the costs on that?

Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#93

Post by strongpigeon »

com2kid wrote: post #64
LuxBennu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency.

That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#94

Post by hgoel »

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…

Powerpoint will continue to persist because other people need to be able to edit your slide deck without understanding your HTML.

My employer blocks office plugins, so I can't try Claude for PowerPoint, but sometimes I get Claude to generate Python scripts, which produce PowerPoint slides via python-pptx. This also benefits from being able to easily read and generate figures from raw data.

I don't really like the way Claude tends to format slides (too much marketing speak and flowcharts), but it has good ideas often enough that it's still worth it to me. So I treat this as a starting point and replace the bad parts.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#95

Post by apsurd »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #90
apsurd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's pretty cool!

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#96

Post by rahimnathwani »

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!

How well does this work compared with using GPT-5.4 in Nicopreme’s Pi for Excel?

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#97

Post by p_ing »

WillAdams wrote: post #92
p_ing wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are the costs on that? Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?

$200-something per user per year. Will vary based on license type and seat count.

No limits.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#98

Post by p_ing »

Avicebron wrote: post #77
p_ing wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're concerned, you don't send it outside of the M365 boundary and presumably your admin has Purview Sensitivity Labels in place covering the document to prevent such activity.

Doesn't that mean you can't actually use it for those sensitive documents?

Correct.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#99

Post by p_ing »

keyle wrote: post #91
p_ing wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Token expenditure isn't a concern for Copilot users. They don't see that form of cost model, just a flat monthly (or yearly) price for a user license.

Exactly, and how do you think it's rigged in the setup? You're not getting top tier OpenAI service with Copilot was my point.

Microsoft runs the model, not OAI.

Re: ChatGPT for Excel

#100

Post by com2kid »

p_ing wrote: post #71
com2kid wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never did this. WAC was the original version (integrated with SharePoint Server). Everything was server-side.

While working at MS I remember someone in the office team saying that the original version of Excel online spun to the actual Excel backend and had it output HTML instead of the usual win32 UI. Was I misinformed by chance?
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