AI in Excel is the dumbest thing I’ve seen MS pull out and the dumbest use of AI I’ve ever seen. And I’m not exaggerating. Read on, cause imma fucking rant.
Excel is the about only reason business uses MS Office. Any free alternative would be just fine for word processing and slide shows. But you cannot risk your numbers and formulas being up for interpretation when they move across software packages and versions, inside or outside the company. (Not to mention broken macros for the power users.)
Can you imagine a near future where Excel is not trusted?! I’m certain you can turn if off, but still, I want to scream. They better at least come out with a GPO that disables it. If the sysadmin can’t control its use, people are going to use it, purposefully or not.
There are billions of man hours and expertise in Excel, it works, it’s compatible across versions, it never, ever, for fucking ever changes. That last point has been the pillar of Excel’s strength from day one. On top of that all, Excel is best in class, no question, no competition.
And now MS threatens to fuck up their flagship Office product, uh, for what gain exactly? Fuck is Nadella thinking?!
“So we got this golden goose, lays eggs like there’s no tomorrow. Let’s risk killing it by trying to squeeze another few eggs a year. Not even sure how AI might work in this use case, but let’s go for it.”
It’s not even a gamble in this situation. Put that shit in every Office product but Excel.
(Yes, I know, alternatives are fine for personal use and finance.)
EDIT: someguy3 pointed out that it appears one has to purposefully use it in the address bar. Still worrying that people have access, but at least it can be cut off via GPO.
User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft 365 Apps > AI Features
The one use case I have for copilot in excel is converting date formats, because that has always been an enormous pain in the ass, but it can’t do that either. So it’s effectively useless bloatware.
I used Excel daily for my job for years and I always said it was Microsoft’s only good product they made. I can see AI being helpful for suggested formulas, but LLMs can’t accurately perform math by predicting the next word 100% of the time. Plain ol’ regular Excel had its quirks, but at least the math was right. Which is why this is a bad implementation of this.
For all of its faults, the Windows Server ecosystem is incredibly good at providing graphical configs for everything that you’ll need for a small to medium sized business, and Windows servers can really survive a surprising amount of abuse. For most things it’s at least acceptable, and on a couple of things (Active Directory with Group Policy, as well as RDP) it’s best in class and very difficult to beat
Of course all of Microsoft’s killer products were built at least 25 years ago by engineers who’ve long since left the organization and it shows. Microsoft is trying so hard to move everything to Azure so they can charge monthly for access, yet everything they build into Azure is somehow worse than the on-prem alternative and as they stop updating on-prem options and keep forcing more and more migration into Azure businesses are going to get more and more frustrated with the constantly rising costs and constant loss of quality. Oh and whenever there’s another Azure outage it’s going to be increasingly un-fun as everything migrates into Azure
Not that I know how copilot in Excel works but if it’s like above where you have to type it into the formula bar, it’s not going to screw up old sheets. I think you can chill out.
It’s not meant for calculations. People do all sorts of calculations in Excel. This is for when you have a bunch of rows with text in them, say for example customer testimonials, and you want to summarize and/or determine sentiment for each one so you can analyze it without reading it all.
I saw a demo of it, and if it works as advertised it could be cool. You can use the results from other queries in other cells, so it feels like using Excel, just with text instead of numbers.
I personally don’t have any use for it, but it has a lot more potential to be useful than most of the AI garbage I see.
Sounds like a bad use-case for Excel. I know it’s not strictly a numbers tools, but sorting lengthy text? Not sure how I’d approach that, never done it, but that doesn’t sound like Excel.
People use Excel for everything. Soo many spreadsheets out there should really have been databases, but the suits have one hammer they know how to use and they’re determined to use it.
TL;DR: Sounds like something someone who knows how to use other tools would say
It’d help if the database options weren’t piles of shit: they’re all so particular about data types and column definitions. And then the data entry tools (“forms”) are always a mix of shit UI and insane programming.
Googles “tables” within sheets get reasonably close to what a system like that should look like.
AI in Excel is the dumbest thing I’ve seen MS pull out and the dumbest use of AI I’ve ever seen. And I’m not exaggerating. Read on, cause imma fucking rant.
Excel is the about only reason business uses MS Office. Any free alternative would be just fine for word processing and slide shows. But you cannot risk your numbers and formulas being up for interpretation when they move across software packages and versions, inside or outside the company. (Not to mention broken macros for the power users.)
Can you imagine a near future where Excel is not trusted?! I’m certain you can turn if off, but still, I want to scream. They better at least come out with a GPO that disables it. If the sysadmin can’t control its use, people are going to use it, purposefully or not.
There are billions of man hours and expertise in Excel, it works, it’s compatible across versions, it never, ever, for fucking ever changes. That last point has been the pillar of Excel’s strength from day one. On top of that all, Excel is best in class, no question, no competition.
And now MS threatens to fuck up their flagship Office product, uh, for what gain exactly? Fuck is Nadella thinking?!
“So we got this golden goose, lays eggs like there’s no tomorrow. Let’s risk killing it by trying to squeeze another few eggs a year. Not even sure how AI might work in this use case, but let’s go for it.”
It’s not even a gamble in this situation. Put that shit in every Office product but Excel.
(Yes, I know, alternatives are fine for personal use and finance.)
EDIT: someguy3 pointed out that it appears one has to purposefully use it in the address bar. Still worrying that people have access, but at least it can be cut off via GPO.
User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft 365 Apps > AI FeaturesThe one use case I have for copilot in excel is converting date formats, because that has always been an enormous pain in the ass, but it can’t do that either. So it’s effectively useless bloatware.
He is a Business Idiot, as verbose blogger Ed zitron wrote about. Out of touch with users and products.
You just described every big tech CEO
Hum…
I sure can. Do you really think you can trust Excel today? I have a couple of points to you:
Feb-1: It already messes everything;
2/2: nobody ever cared.
And every Excel user knows those foibles. Why do you think MS never fixed them? I’m back to “it never, ever, for fucking ever changes”.
I used Excel daily for my job for years and I always said it was Microsoft’s only good product they made. I can see AI being helpful for suggested formulas, but LLMs can’t accurately perform math by predicting the next word 100% of the time. Plain ol’ regular Excel had its quirks, but at least the math was right. Which is why this is a bad implementation of this.
I’d vote for Active Directory being a solid product. If you’re running a fleet of Windows machines, accept no substitute. :)
To forestall any comments about alternative auth schemes; If that’s all you think AD is, you don’t know AD.
For all of its faults, the Windows Server ecosystem is incredibly good at providing graphical configs for everything that you’ll need for a small to medium sized business, and Windows servers can really survive a surprising amount of abuse. For most things it’s at least acceptable, and on a couple of things (Active Directory with Group Policy, as well as RDP) it’s best in class and very difficult to beat
Of course all of Microsoft’s killer products were built at least 25 years ago by engineers who’ve long since left the organization and it shows. Microsoft is trying so hard to move everything to Azure so they can charge monthly for access, yet everything they build into Azure is somehow worse than the on-prem alternative and as they stop updating on-prem options and keep forcing more and more migration into Azure businesses are going to get more and more frustrated with the constantly rising costs and constant loss of quality. Oh and whenever there’s another Azure outage it’s going to be increasingly un-fun as everything migrates into Azure
Regardless of the quality of AD as a product (it’s mostly good but has a lot of questionable stuff…)
It has been the sole driver of LDAP + Kerberos standardization over the last 20 years, and has excelled in that despite its flaws.
Not that I know how copilot in Excel works but if it’s like above where you have to type it into the formula bar, it’s not going to screw up old sheets. I think you can chill out.
Oh! Didn’t catch that you have to use it on purpose. Not so bad as I made out, but my point on people using it if not blocked may still stand.
It’s not meant for calculations. People do all sorts of calculations in Excel. This is for when you have a bunch of rows with text in them, say for example customer testimonials, and you want to summarize and/or determine sentiment for each one so you can analyze it without reading it all.
I saw a demo of it, and if it works as advertised it could be cool. You can use the results from other queries in other cells, so it feels like using Excel, just with text instead of numbers.
I personally don’t have any use for it, but it has a lot more potential to be useful than most of the AI garbage I see.
Sounds like a bad use-case for Excel. I know it’s not strictly a numbers tools, but sorting lengthy text? Not sure how I’d approach that, never done it, but that doesn’t sound like Excel.
People use Excel for everything. Soo many spreadsheets out there should really have been databases, but the suits have one hammer they know how to use and they’re determined to use it.
TL;DR: Sounds like something someone who knows how to use other tools would say
It’d help if the database options weren’t piles of shit: they’re all so particular about data types and column definitions. And then the data entry tools (“forms”) are always a mix of shit UI and insane programming.
Googles “tables” within sheets get reasonably close to what a system like that should look like.
This is what Power Query is for