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 PowerPoint.
Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.
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 expensive ($100/day for heavy users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.
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.
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 native feature can. If copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-in with less access is likely not be better.
Would love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel. Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT for Excel does really well on complex sheets.
> 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.
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.
you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated slides as a medium for anything, but i've been proven wrong tine and again that people love their pp.
We have many people in my wider team (Finance) that are AI skeptics purely because of their experience with Copilot. Like they don't know what AI is actually capable of when outside of the shackles of Copilot.
Oh wow, I used to work on Excel Add-Ins about 10 years ago. Even got a patent for it. I'd be curious to see how they implemented the calls.
We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on Excel Web). I remember fighting so hard to have it be called `context.sync()` instead of `context.executeAsync()`...
That being said, done poorly it can be slow as the round-trip time on web can be on the order of seconds (at least back then).
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 costly on Excel web (currently my add-in is only developed for desktop Excel, but I might consider adding support for Excel web in the future)?
In any case, `context.sync()` is much better than `context.executeAsync()`.
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 latency for every call (that was back then, it might be better now). On the desktop app it's not as bad since the add-in and the Excel process are on the same machine so what you're paying is mostly serialization costs.
Happy to answer more questions, though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have changed since.
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.
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 if the bug is fixed (I’m not exaggerating). The view code for xldesktop is not layered particularly well either leading to a lot of dependencies on Win32 in xlshared (at least back then).
Is it doable? I’m sure. But the benefits are probably not worth the cost.
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.
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).
> 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].
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!
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.
I've experimented with ChatGPT for spreadsheets the past 6 months, and while the results look nice now it has been excruciatingly slow for even the simplest spreadsheet. I'm talking 15-20 minutes to make some pretty basic calculator with graphs. IIRC, it used a lot of time purely on the styling.
Engineer on ChatGPT for Excel here. Useful feedback. We have improved the latency inside the add-in a lot and a lot more to come. We also have the Fast, Standard and Heavy thinking modes, where you can adjust the thinking time depending on the task complexity. Curious to hear your feedback once you try this out!
I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output.
Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though).
SVG looks similar to the XML format of spreadsheets. I wonder if LLMs struggle with that?
The LLMs seem to struggle at anything that isn't relatively well anchored in whatever space. HTML documents have a lot of foundation to them in the training data, so they seem to perform well by comparison to other things.
I just spent a few hours trying to get GPT5.4 to write strict, git compatible patches and concluded this is a huge waste of time. It's a lot easier and more stable to do simple find/replace or overwrite the whole file each time. Same story in places like Unity or Blender. The ability to coordinate things in 3d is really bad still. You can get clean output using parametric scenes, but that's about it.
Claude's diagramming tool that they have built into their web UI is my goto for this task. It's reliable enough that I often will delegate to it first with what I need written in prose instead of using mermaid/lucid diagram
Several months ago, ChatGPT swore to me it had interoperability with both excel and Google Sheets. I spent 90 minutes thinking I was an idiot, trying to follow its guidance before asking the internet.
Microsoft has this built-in using Claude models (for M365 Copilot licensed users). I don't know why you'd use this as an M365 subscriber in an enterprise. I'm sure there's some edge cases, but MSFT has been moving away from OAI. Even Copilot Studio agents now default to Sonnet 4.6 and not GPT 5.
MSFT also has a stake in Anthropic (although much less than 27%) and they host Anthropic models in Foundry now. The end game for MSFT has always been being the compute provider, so MSFT is just as happy to use any model as long as it's running in Foundry.
Based on my discussion with DSEs, enterprises have not been impressed in the results of "Copilot", i.e. OAI models. MSFT has been replacing (or changing the default) to Claude across a variety of Copilot endpoints.
In principle, I find it valuable to integrate tools. However, in this case I would be somewhat cautious, especially as "your chats, attachments, and workbook content — may be shared with OpenAI" (as per the Microsoft Marketplace description: https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/WA200010215?...).
This seems like a security nightmare, which is especially relevant because sensitive data is often stored in Excel files.
Hi, engineer on this add-in. Fair concern but we never train on any of our business or enterprise user data, or if you have opted-out of training on your ChatGPT account.
Yeah, I was expecting that you do not train on business or enterprise user data. However, I am not just worried about "training", but also about "sharing". Furthermore, I am worried about cases where an individual has chosen to integrate an add-in and then inadvertently leaks sensitive data.
However, it may be important to note that these security considerations are relevant for most Office Add-Ins (and not just the ChatGPT add-in).
Forgive my ignorance. How do you folks manage context retention? Say if someone had a sensitive excel document they wanted inference done over, how is that data actually sent to the model and then stored or deleted?
It seems one of the biggest barriers to people's adoption is concern over data leaving their ecosystem and then not being protected or being retained in some way.
Is this is an SLA that a small or medium sized company could get?
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.
That's the nature of these add-ins. Modern Add-ins are all little XML frames with some JS or whatever. All processing occurs server-side, hosted by the add-in publisher.
This is counter to the old (security nightmare) COM model where processing could be local.
To clarify: add-ins are essentially web pages. They can do some processing client side if they want, but yeah in the case of a ChatGPT add-in it's not like they're running the model in a web frame.
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.
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.
It was partially a joke but someone posted a image of Co-pilot in Excel to demonstrate the limits of these things. Three cells with three numbers (1, 2, 3) and co-pilot asked to sum these three up.
Instead of answering with 6, it came up with 15. The comment was "If AI is doing this, a global financial crash is inevitable."
Might not be real but it is something to keep an eye on. Hopefully, they are a bit more cautious on how this is implemented.
I wonder why it's so bad. Do they just paste a CSV into the raw model? Because in my experience, even small local models can handle it reasonably well if the harness forces them to write & run a Python script that parses the table and performs the calculations, instead of relying solely on next-token prediction.
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.
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+corporate finance+valuation+asset management) and what the actual production process is. These tools are irrelevant, disrupt flow and if anything just add noise to what one is doing.
Remember when Steve said 'The computers for the rest of us'?
I suppose it isn't a surprise. Are researchers/generally geeky people meant to be able to relate to the average person's day-to-day beyond their sphere? Lmao.
You can't produce stuff for people you don't understand. Understand being a very key term.
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.
Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.
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 expensive ($100/day for heavy users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far behind though.
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.
For added benefit, full screen?
Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.
Microsoft fumbled so badly here.
We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on Excel Web). I remember fighting so hard to have it be called `context.sync()` instead of `context.executeAsync()`...
That being said, done poorly it can be slow as the round-trip time on web can be on the order of seconds (at least back then).
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 costly on Excel web (currently my add-in is only developed for desktop Excel, but I might consider adding support for Excel web in the future)?
In any case, `context.sync()` is much better than `context.executeAsync()`.
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 latency for every call (that was back then, it might be better now). On the desktop app it's not as bad since the add-in and the Excel process are on the same machine so what you're paying is mostly serialization costs.
Happy to answer more questions, though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have changed since.
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.
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 if the bug is fixed (I’m not exaggerating). The view code for xldesktop is not layered particularly well either leading to a lot of dependencies on Win32 in xlshared (at least back then).
Is it doable? I’m sure. But the benefits are probably not worth the cost.
Now that’s an acronym that I had forgotten about.
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...
I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output.
Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though).
SVG looks similar to the XML format of spreadsheets. I wonder if LLMs struggle with that?
I just spent a few hours trying to get GPT5.4 to write strict, git compatible patches and concluded this is a huge waste of time. It's a lot easier and more stable to do simple find/replace or overwrite the whole file each time. Same story in places like Unity or Blender. The ability to coordinate things in 3d is really bad still. You can get clean output using parametric scenes, but that's about it.
You're not wrong, but you'd think that given their 27% stake in OpenAI they'd put more weight behind ChatGPT integration.
This seems like a security nightmare, which is especially relevant because sensitive data is often stored in Excel files.
However, it may be important to note that these security considerations are relevant for most Office Add-Ins (and not just the ChatGPT add-in).
It seems one of the biggest barriers to people's adoption is concern over data leaving their ecosystem and then not being protected or being retained in some way.
Is this is an SLA that a small or medium sized company could get?
This is counter to the old (security nightmare) COM model where processing could be local.
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
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.
Instead of answering with 6, it came up with 15. The comment was "If AI is doing this, a global financial crash is inevitable."
Might not be real but it is something to keep an eye on. Hopefully, they are a bit more cautious on how this is implemented.
Damn that OAI valuation is like a sore boil that is about to explode.
Also once again, a lack of imagination from OAI. Damn vision really is super scarce huh.
meanwhile not that ant is genius, except the timing of dow drama right before Iran war.
Microsoft, being Microsoft, will find a way to win no matter who that vendor ends up being.
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...
They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these people are doing in the job (accounting+corporate finance+valuation+asset management) and what the actual production process is. These tools are irrelevant, disrupt flow and if anything just add noise to what one is doing.
I know there are employees of those firms here that would love to know. But nah lmao.
They don't do the job, reliably or well. No amount of wishful thinking or extra tokens will change that.
Remember when Steve said 'The computers for the rest of us'?
I suppose it isn't a surprise. Are researchers/generally geeky people meant to be able to relate to the average person's day-to-day beyond their sphere? Lmao.
You can't produce stuff for people you don't understand. Understand being a very key term.