Nowadays I just make single-purpose websites with Claude Code because Google Sheets has such poor AI integration and is outrageously tedious to edit.
They had all the parts and I have a subscription and it still does terrible things like prompt me to use pandas after exporting as a CSV. It will mention some cell and then can’t read it. It can’t edit tables so they just get overwritten with other tables it generates.
It reminds me of something a friend told me: he heard that Google employees do dogfood their products; some even multiple times every year. There’s no way anyone internal uses Sheets even that often.
Given how well the API works, that we are discussing Googlers, my guess is that's how they dog food their services. Programmers don't get hired by Google for mouse skills.
The GUI is for spot checking results, final presentation.
If you're sitting there point-n-clicking everything into place perhaps consider you are doing it wrong.
I have no idea if they do or not, but it's a plausible explanation...
Do you mean restricted workflow? Googles APIs are pretty much 1:1 to the GUI
And using Python makes it trivial to copy-paste out of files and other APIs with one run of Python
Versus all the fiddling in browser tabs with a mouse, it actually affords an incredibly wide set of options to quickly collate and format data
The libraries themselves are OK, but MS uses them stupidly. If you want to fill out some form in DOCX or XSLX format you will get broken formatting. And this is from Office company.
Claude one-shot something with a Python script that was pretty okay.
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.
You get models that are formatted and structured and which balance - but there are errors introduced which an analyst / human wouldn’t make.
Stuff like hard coded values, or incorrect cell logic which guarantees the model balances.
Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?
No limits.
Yet.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.
I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far behind though.
Microsoft fumbled so badly here.
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.
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.
we've hit this point where its cool to have claude reinvent every wheel just because it can.
For added benefit, full screen?
Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.
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...
This time even for pro.
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.
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.
You're not wrong, but you'd think that given their 27% stake in OpenAI they'd put more weight behind ChatGPT integration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, yes but no. Not that I care, but the answer to the above question is a no, and should start with No.
Microsoft, being Microsoft, will find a way to win no matter who that vendor ends up being.
[for] ... users outside the EU.
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...
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.
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.