Excel is one place where AI makes sense. All the data is there, in a nice structured and typed format with headings etc. Easily verifiable and to provide the reasoning for its work.
LLMs lose context over a short session. They all have input limits. Very small input limits usually. Best it can probably do is suggest formulas for you based on your natural language, maybe some copy/paste. Which means it can beat a 9 year old, great news everyone! Or show a help article on pivot tables (which the help function already does!)
Excel is very simple to work with, hence its ubiquity. LLMs also get shit wrong about half the time, way more than half with difficult things ime. Meaning they cost experienced operators time, a few studies are showing this now with coding. And are expensive as fuck. And slow as fuck. And reduce capacity for learning. Meaning they actually cap what excel can achieve, as the user won’t grow at the same rate, renoving the one advantage excel actually has: the learning rate is phenomenal
The C-Suite which insisted on this integration is basically an subservient idiot themselves at this stage who doesn’t understand their product, their market fit, or their userbase. They should replace thenselves with an LLM
I think you didn’t even read the article or read up about this integration.
This isn’t just an LLM, it’s Agentic AI.
AI is a tool that needs to be learned how to be used properly. Anyone can pick it up and get results that are “good enough“, but in the right hands what can be done is incredible - just like with any tool.
Look at something like minecraft as a perfect example of what can be done with a tool in the right hands.
Most people don’t understand “AI” as it is, and mistakenly think it’s just a school assignment cheating tool and a chat bot that makes things up.
People in here have been saying since LLMs can’t do maths perfectly it’s terrible for numbers, but they can’t see that it doesn’t need to do maths here because it’s in excel and excel has formulas and functions that can.
It’s crazy how the mere mention of AI makes some people lose any and all semblance of critical thinking and intelligence.
Excel is very simple to work with
Ok so your idea of excel is just what your average person might do at home with it - that’s not what or who this stuff is for.
And it will fuck up around half of even the simple formulas. This is really bad, and the idiots in charge should feel bad. Excel basically runs the world and they are about to fuck it up
I swear none of you guys have even attempted to use AI to do data analysis. I have, I built a MCP and integrated a copilot agent into Teams which has access to specific database data, and refined the rules for it to the point where the CFO rigorously tested it (and still does) and trusts the results it returns.
The problem with being a pragmatic LLM user is that you have on one side corporate America shoe-horning the tech in mediocre products none wants, and on the other side a large portion of the internet who loathe it but don’t use it and don’t even know what it does. Those conversations never go anywhere man. You’re talking to someone who thinks accuracy of 57% on SpreadsheetBench means the model gives wrong answers 42% of the time.
Hate to agree with Microsoft but yeah, Excel is probably a great place to introduce an LLM. It’s in that sweet spot between natural language and light programming, in an environment with math baked in so you don’t really care about the model’s accuracy or exact recall. All the data is here, and the model only has to manipulates cell numbers and writes formulas in this dumbed down language.
I’m sure you can get away with pretty small models too. It doesn’t need super human knowledge to implement 90% of common Excel use cases, and i suspect in real world scenarios the accuracy must be pretty interesting.
Excel is one place where AI makes sense. All the data is there, in a nice structured and typed format with headings etc. Easily verifiable and to provide the reasoning for its work.
LLMs can’t count. Can’t add. Can’t deal with actually large datasets
How is excel a good fit for vibe-coding?
This isn’t just an LLM. It uses excel functions and features to do the counting and adding and dealing with large data sets.
It’s not “vibe coding” as much as “vibe performing steps in excel”.
Also LLMs absolutely can deal with large data sets anyway. Not sure where you got that from.
LLMs lose context over a short session. They all have input limits. Very small input limits usually. Best it can probably do is suggest formulas for you based on your natural language, maybe some copy/paste. Which means it can beat a 9 year old, great news everyone! Or show a help article on pivot tables (which the help function already does!)
Excel is very simple to work with, hence its ubiquity. LLMs also get shit wrong about half the time, way more than half with difficult things ime. Meaning they cost experienced operators time, a few studies are showing this now with coding. And are expensive as fuck. And slow as fuck. And reduce capacity for learning. Meaning they actually cap what excel can achieve, as the user won’t grow at the same rate, renoving the one advantage excel actually has: the learning rate is phenomenal
The C-Suite which insisted on this integration is basically an subservient idiot themselves at this stage who doesn’t understand their product, their market fit, or their userbase. They should replace thenselves with an LLM
I think you didn’t even read the article or read up about this integration.
This isn’t just an LLM, it’s Agentic AI.
AI is a tool that needs to be learned how to be used properly. Anyone can pick it up and get results that are “good enough“, but in the right hands what can be done is incredible - just like with any tool.
Look at something like minecraft as a perfect example of what can be done with a tool in the right hands.
Most people don’t understand “AI” as it is, and mistakenly think it’s just a school assignment cheating tool and a chat bot that makes things up.
People in here have been saying since LLMs can’t do maths perfectly it’s terrible for numbers, but they can’t see that it doesn’t need to do maths here because it’s in excel and excel has formulas and functions that can.
It’s crazy how the mere mention of AI makes some people lose any and all semblance of critical thinking and intelligence.
Ok so your idea of excel is just what your average person might do at home with it - that’s not what or who this stuff is for.
And it will fuck up around half of even the simple formulas. This is really bad, and the idiots in charge should feel bad. Excel basically runs the world and they are about to fuck it up
And people will fuck up those same formulas 30% of the time (vs 45% of agent mode).
AI isn’t being forced into being the only way to do spreadsheets.
Until it starts pulling data from nonexistent worksheets
You tell it not to.
I swear none of you guys have even attempted to use AI to do data analysis. I have, I built a MCP and integrated a copilot agent into Teams which has access to specific database data, and refined the rules for it to the point where the CFO rigorously tested it (and still does) and trusts the results it returns.
The problem with being a pragmatic LLM user is that you have on one side corporate America shoe-horning the tech in mediocre products none wants, and on the other side a large portion of the internet who loathe it but don’t use it and don’t even know what it does. Those conversations never go anywhere man. You’re talking to someone who thinks accuracy of 57% on SpreadsheetBench means the model gives wrong answers 42% of the time.
Hate to agree with Microsoft but yeah, Excel is probably a great place to introduce an LLM. It’s in that sweet spot between natural language and light programming, in an environment with math baked in so you don’t really care about the model’s accuracy or exact recall. All the data is here, and the model only has to manipulates cell numbers and writes formulas in this dumbed down language.
I’m sure you can get away with pretty small models too. It doesn’t need super human knowledge to implement 90% of common Excel use cases, and i suspect in real world scenarios the accuracy must be pretty interesting.
It could be good to layer in standard machine learning (ML), and it already does have some features (like line of best fit).
However, in today’s context AI means LLMs, and that is not a good fit due to its unpredictability.