Hey, a server farm just burned through 250kw/hrs in 2 seconds and wasted 20 gallons of fresh water so you could get the wrong answer on a basic math request. We just need another 25 billion and 14 more months, and control of your government, and your personal freedom, but don't worry, it's gonna be so rad...
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
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
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.
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 sounds great as a prompting system to make features more usable. As auto complete for cell level values it would be absurd. Being able to prompt a pivot table or let AI figure out the combination of functions to get a value you wanted seems useful.
Programmers use AI for assistance. It can be good or bad depending on the programmer.
Excel is a really a development environment.
Just like a bad programmer would use AI to write a function to add two numbers, a bad Excel user would use AI to add two numbers. But if you needed a complex formula and were not sure how to start, AI could give a suggestion that might be right or wrong just like using Stack Overflow. It's up to the programmer to understand and test the results.
The example I saw them use was turning one line text reviews into a simple positive or negative so you can count them.
So it could be useful for things like that, even if we ignore the "then why not just ask for the star rating" that probably went along with that review...
MS is now an AI company that sells to excited bosses who would love to fire somebody somewhere to save a few bucks.
In the short term, people who rushed into AI are finding out that a 1 in 100 error rate is absurdly high when literally every action is done through an LLM.
Ah, sorry, I though you were disagreeing with me by posting a link that companies are unsuccessful with it, so I was confused - because my point was that error rate is gigantic. My bad!
I used to work for Comcast as a mobile app developer. We used to get uncountable numbers of reviews along the lines of "I gave this app one star because you can't give an app zero stars". Honestly depressing even though I wasn't personally responsible for the apps or the company.
As far as I can tell, it's for people who already use excel wrong. The examples I've seen involve using it to process text in natural language (duh, that's what LLMs are best at). I could see using it to turn aggregated numbers (calculated using deterministic algebra, not Copilot) into a presentation, if you assemble the facts it's supposed to use, but at that point I'd just as quickly slap them into our corporate template and not worry about tweaking a prompt to spare me from having to actually exercise any non-technical skills.
You are absolutely correct, I see where I made an error by treating 1, 2, and 3 each like different things. The correct answer is 123. I've updated the spreadsheet to reflect this and also cleared out the original data since we have the sum and no longer need it.
Now to send the spreadsheet to India to verify the answer.
Copilot wants your permission to send this file to India.
Reject
Ok, I won't send your copy. But I really want to verify my change, so I've taken the liberty of sending Microsoft's copy. Don't worry, I did see that this is a financial spreadsheet and am submitting your information for credit locks because it's already been sold.
Oops! There was a problem performing that last action! (Blocked. Note: Who the hell taught copilot to do this? This exposes us to fraud lawsuits from those we sold the data to.)
Oops! There was a problem performing the last action! (Blocked. Note: We don't want these notes being sent directly to users.)
Oops! There was a problem performing the last action! (Blocked. Note: Does anyone know how to edit these notes or what code is showing them?? This looks really bad!)
Oh sorry, you are absolutely right! 😅 I see that 1×2×3 equals 6. I did not realize at first that you wanted me to multiply the numbers.
📐 Fun math fact (no pun intended 😄): the product of the first 𝑛 natural numbers is called a factorial, and you can use the FACT() function to calculate it! The factorial of 3 is 3! = 1×2×3 =6.
I'm amazed that it can't figure out that it should just defer arithmetic to like, all the functions that Excel already has, rather than trying to LLM its way to the correct answer.
If you could ask it to do something in Excel that you don't know how to do, and it did it using Excel functions and maybe explained it to you, that would be useful, but as it is now, that thing isn't trustworthy at all.
They straight up tell you to not use it for math. It's for analyzing a bunch of text you shoved into a spreadsheet, say for example customer testimonials or something. Making it work most of the time would actually be worse, because then people would be more inclined to use it instead of writing the formulas to do it right.
No AI truly knows what it's doing. You can give it things to call out to, but you can't know for sure if it will use them, and definitely can't know it will pass it the right parameters.
How is looking at ascii values supposed to help when someone prompts it with "calculate the sum of the numbers above"? The whole point is that no matter what kind of prescreening you add to an LLM, people will write prompts which are missed by the screening.
There are no values from the spreadsheet in this case. "The numbers above" are just text to the LLM.
They could of course require that optional cell or cell range parameter after the prompt, but that would eliminate some use cases. "Generate some text", one of the stated use cases in the help text, doesn't reference any cells.
Also, numbers in Excel aren't necessarily as clear cut as you make it seem. Excel famously thinks everything is a date, and how number-y must a number be before it isn't okay?
Not to mention there are other things to do with numbers which don't require arithmetic. What if someone wants to have Excel translate 34 to "thirty-four"? Or have Excel generate a poem 34 words long? Or whatever else nonsense people might try.
Passing the range is optional, as per the documentation. However, when used with a separate range parameter, it does return correct results. Note that specifying a range inside the text prompt will not work, even though it should be the exact same request sent to the model.
I'm not sure what the intended purpose for this is, but it can return crazy numbers when doing math. You can ask it to add some cells in a completely empty spreadsheet and it'll return some random numbers.
Yeah, plenty of warnings in there about not using it for numbers.
And also this:
The COPILOT function only has access to data provided through the context arguments. It does not have access to:
Other data from the workbook
So it's optional only in that it won't even look at the spreadsheet when returning the result. I suspect the next 20 years of AI research will be teaching it to say "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" when appropriate.
Hilariously that's part of how Facebooks llama.cpp local chatbot became so popular. It was initially released only to researchers and research institutions but someone rapidly uploaded it to some warez sites and the cat was out of the bag from there. Subsequent releases of llama were released under far more permissive licenses after it became clear that it wasn't as dangerous as they feared
When you use spread sheets a lot, much of what makes you productive is that you know exactly what Excel will do. Like yes I know it's going to try to increment when actually I want to fill this column with 1s or whatever, but I can hold ctrl and override it and all is good.
With copilot, you will never be sure what it's going to do. I feel like it would slow me down even if it guessed right 90% of the time.
That's not just limited to excel. The basic value of computers is how deterministic they are. AI is just probability programs that are reintroduce chaos into the system.
I'm pretty sure it just replaces itself with what it thinks is the correct Excel expression. That way the use can audit and correct the AI's work (and Microsoft isn't liable for miscalculations). Firing off to co-pilot every evaluation would be insanely irresponsible.
Ah yes financial crisis, those one in a lifetime events that only affect poors that are manufactured because it is also a cash injection for the needy rich slop
Well it seems it kind of already have happen.
The austerity in the European Union have been justified by an excel error. Of course, the lack of control of conclusion that please the bourgeoisie is not a coincidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItGMz0ERvcw
I am wrong and Microsoft is even dummer then i thought to allow this.
FYI: this image is fake.
The sentiment is true but there is no such thing as a =Copilot() command.
Source: My work gave me a pro license and i could not replicate this. It still absolutely sucks in every conceivable way compared with claude.The only other way is if this is a region exclusive update but even then its questionable because the implication of those cells updating live could be exploited to be very expensive for ms.
Looks like the screenshot uses the formula wrong (no context cells passed), but still... And the docs warn you not to use it for any numerical or high stakes/financial tasks lol
"DO NOT USE IF ACCURACY IS IMPORTANT TO YOU" 😂
There is no need to be overly dramatic. As far as i was aware i had the latest version and highest tier license making me assume i could actually test this.
I swallow my words when provided with proof. And i will take an experienced person their world in fields I don’t have experience myself.
There are a lot of jokes around that get mis interpreted as real facts on the current internet. You also should not automatically belief stuff online. Critical thinking and doing your own research are still important even when considering that you can fuck that part up.
104 Comments
reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net · 128 pts · 292d
Wrong output and takes longer than the original method. Excellent, excellent
DrFistington@lemmy.world · 55 pts · 292d
Hey, a server farm just burned through 250kw/hrs in 2 seconds and wasted 20 gallons of fresh water so you could get the wrong answer on a basic math request. We just need another 25 billion and 14 more months, and control of your government, and your personal freedom, but don't worry, it's gonna be so rad...
grandel@lemmy.ml · 14 pts · 291d
You forgot: destroys the only known habitat for humans 👌🏼
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 292d
The Max Power way!
No1@aussie.zone · 7 pts · 291d
Shhhhhhhh, bro!
I'm vibe-sheeting over here, and you're messing with my flow!
DupaCycki@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 290d
This is evidently because of lack of funding towards the AI industry. Stop being greedy and let them have your last $10. Think about humanity!
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 290d
"Yesterday, we were on the brink of abyss. Today, we took a step forward"
shalafi@lemmy.world · 83 pts · 292d
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 Featuresjjjalljs@ttrpg.network · 33 pts · 292d
He is a Business Idiot, as verbose blogger Ed zitron wrote about. Out of touch with users and products.
ICastFist@programming.dev · 11 pts · 291d
You just described every big tech CEO
marcos@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 292d
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.
shalafi@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 292d
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".
bulwark@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 292d
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.
shalafi@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 292d
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.
Hawke@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 291d
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.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 290d
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
Pringles@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 292d
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.
someguy3@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 292d
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.
shalafi@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 292d
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.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 292d
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.
shalafi@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 292d
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.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 292d
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
Hawke@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 291d
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.
4am@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 291d
This is what Power Query is for
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network · 1 pts · 282d
I mostly agree with you, except for the fact that LibreOffice Calc is actually better once you get used to it.
I can't say the same for the rest of the LO suite, because that's just a decent replacement rather than an improvement.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 220d
AI in Excel sounds great as a prompting system to make features more usable. As auto complete for cell level values it would be absurd. Being able to prompt a pivot table or let AI figure out the combination of functions to get a value you wanted seems useful.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 220d
Programmers use AI for assistance. It can be good or bad depending on the programmer.
Excel is a really a development environment.
Just like a bad programmer would use AI to write a function to add two numbers, a bad Excel user would use AI to add two numbers. But if you needed a complex formula and were not sure how to start, AI could give a suggestion that might be right or wrong just like using Stack Overflow. It's up to the programmer to understand and test the results.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 78 pts · 291d
To be fair, MS says you shouldn't use it for caculations.
"Why is it there then?" No clue.
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 28 pts · 291d
The example I saw them use was turning one line text reviews into a simple positive or negative so you can count them.
So it could be useful for things like that, even if we ignore the "then why not just ask for the star rating" that probably went along with that review...
MS is now an AI company that sells to excited bosses who would love to fire somebody somewhere to save a few bucks.
turdcollector69@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 291d
"... to save a few bucks."
In the short term, people who rushed into AI are finding out that a 1 in 100 error rate is absurdly high when literally every action is done through an LLM.
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 290d
No third-party research ever arrived at such absurdly low number as 1% error rate.
Internal OpenAi research from May 2025 said 50% error rate and growing.
turdcollector69@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
This is a headline from a few weeks ago
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 290d
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here?
turdcollector69@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
Just giving evidence that companies are bailing from AI, fuel for the fire so to speak
ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 290d
Ah, sorry, I though you were disagreeing with me by posting a link that companies are unsuccessful with it, so I was confused - because my point was that error rate is gigantic. My bad!
T156@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 291d
At the same time, that sounds like something you'd just use old-fashioned sentiment analysis for.
It's less accurate, but also far less demanding, and doesn't risk hallucinating.
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network · 1 pts · 282d
I might be mistaken, but don't these two lines mean the exact opposite in this context?
Is AI more often right, or more often wrong?
T156@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 282d
Both, because the way it's right and wrong are different.
Sentiment analysis might misclassify some of the data, but it doesn't risk making things up wholescale like an LLM would.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 291d
I used to work for Comcast as a mobile app developer. We used to get uncountable numbers of reviews along the lines of "I gave this app one star because you can't give an app zero stars". Honestly depressing even though I wasn't personally responsible for the apps or the company.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 290d
Do you think someone dumb enough to cause problems with this is smart enough to read the warning?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 290d
There's different kinds of smartness and dumbness and they are not always toggled on.
Miaou@jlai.lu · 10 pts · 291d
Sounds like it's made to replace C-suits
BilSabab@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 290d
you should use it write a beautiful poem! That's what calculators are for!
87Six@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 290d
That is only there to cover their asses not to actually be informative
luciferofastora@feddit.org · 3 pts · 248d
As far as I can tell, it's for people who already use excel wrong. The examples I've seen involve using it to process text in natural language (duh, that's what LLMs are best at). I could see using it to turn aggregated numbers (calculated using deterministic algebra, not Copilot) into a presentation, if you assemble the facts it's supposed to use, but at that point I'd just as quickly slap them into our corporate template and not worry about tweaking a prompt to spare me from having to actually exercise any non-technical skills.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · 47 pts · 292d
> Show your work
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 291d
You are absolutely correct, I see where I made an error by treating 1, 2, and 3 each like different things. The correct answer is 123. I've updated the spreadsheet to reflect this and also cleared out the original data since we have the sum and no longer need it.
Now to send the spreadsheet to India to verify the answer.
Copilot wants your permission to send this file to India.
Ok, I won't send your copy. But I really want to verify my change, so I've taken the liberty of sending Microsoft's copy. Don't worry, I did see that this is a financial spreadsheet and am submitting your information for credit locks because it's already been sold.
Oops! There was a problem performing that last action! (Blocked. Note: Who the hell taught copilot to do this? This exposes us to fraud lawsuits from those we sold the data to.)
Oops! There was a problem performing the last action! (Blocked. Note: We don't want these notes being sent directly to users.)
Oops! There was a problem performing the last action! (Blocked. Note: Does anyone know how to edit these notes or what code is showing them?? This looks really bad!)
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · 4 pts · 291d
> The result is actually 6.
rem26_art@fedia.io · 37 pts · 292d
I'm amazed that it can't figure out that it should just defer arithmetic to like, all the functions that Excel already has, rather than trying to LLM its way to the correct answer.
If you could ask it to do something in Excel that you don't know how to do, and it did it using Excel functions and maybe explained it to you, that would be useful, but as it is now, that thing isn't trustworthy at all.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 292d
They straight up tell you to not use it for math. It's for analyzing a bunch of text you shoved into a spreadsheet, say for example customer testimonials or something. Making it work most of the time would actually be worse, because then people would be more inclined to use it instead of writing the formulas to do it right.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 291d
Shouldn't excelAI know when it's doing math?
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 291d
No AI truly knows what it's doing. You can give it things to call out to, but you can't know for sure if it will use them, and definitely can't know it will pass it the right parameters.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 291d
It can recognise the difference between text(>63) and numbers (<58). Even if it's just a preprocessing screening.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 291d
How is looking at ascii values supposed to help when someone prompts it with "calculate the sum of the numbers above"? The whole point is that no matter what kind of prescreening you add to an LLM, people will write prompts which are missed by the screening.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 291d
Because you can check if values input from the spreadsheet are non-numeric.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
There are no values from the spreadsheet in this case. "The numbers above" are just text to the LLM.
They could of course require that optional cell or cell range parameter after the prompt, but that would eliminate some use cases. "Generate some text", one of the stated use cases in the help text, doesn't reference any cells.
Also, numbers in Excel aren't necessarily as clear cut as you make it seem. Excel famously thinks everything is a date, and how number-y must a number be before it isn't okay?
Not to mention there are other things to do with numbers which don't require arithmetic. What if someone wants to have Excel translate 34 to "thirty-four"? Or have Excel generate a poem 34 words long? Or whatever else nonsense people might try.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 290d
Lol more features for people abusing Excel and trying to treat it like a database
ryathal@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 220d
You're thinking about it as a user. AI based auto complete is an impressive sounding feature that got someone a promotion or bonus.
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 34 pts · 291d
IIRC, you're supposed to also pass a range of cells for the "AI" to work on.
But the fact that it just returned a number rather than "You're using this wrong, dickhead" is a problem in itself.
runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 pts · 291d
And if you have to supply the range then it's even less useful than the sum function
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 291d
Turns out this is exactly the problem with SPSS, which dates to 1968.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
Passing the range is optional, as per the documentation. However, when used with a separate range parameter, it does return correct results. Note that specifying a range inside the text prompt will not work, even though it should be the exact same request sent to the model.
I'm not sure what the intended purpose for this is, but it can return crazy numbers when doing math. You can ask it to add some cells in a completely empty spreadsheet and it'll return some random numbers.
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 4 pts · 290d
Yeah, plenty of warnings in there about not using it for numbers.
And also this:
So it's optional only in that it won't even look at the spreadsheet when returning the result. I suspect the next 20 years of AI research will be teaching it to say "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" when appropriate.
Zachariah@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 292d
The dogCopilot ate myhomeworkspreadsheet.AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works · 31 pts · 290d
hansolo@lemmy.today · 14 pts · 290d
... 3 hours later...
ThanksObama@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 290d
Should have just remembered the new cover sheet for your TPS reports.
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com · 21 pts · 292d
The previous Non-AI would have written the 4th of January 1900 in that cell.
ptu@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 291d
Or 1.237377383 for some reason
finitebanjo@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 291d
I'm so glad my pirated softwares can't update to this shit.
BilSabab@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 290d
imaging pirating AI - now that's something stupid
bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 290d
Not as stupid as paying for it
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 290d
Hilariously that's part of how Facebooks llama.cpp local chatbot became so popular. It was initially released only to researchers and research institutions but someone rapidly uploaded it to some warez sites and the cat was out of the bag from there. Subsequent releases of llama were released under far more permissive licenses after it became clear that it wasn't as dangerous as they feared
BilSabab@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
yeah, that shitshow was one epic nothingburger in the end.
Taleya@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 290d
I'm still running office 2007 lol.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 290d
Did that version have the "WordArt" clipart text features?
Truly we've made negative progress ever since.
Taleya@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 290d
Oh yeah baby. You know it
18107@aussie.zone · 15 pts · 292d
If done correctly it could actually be useful. It could read the input text, select the numbers above, and feed those numbers to the sum command.
But no, the language model is told to solve a mathematical equation with no assistance. Of course it's going to fail.
Dave@lemmy.nz · 38 pts · 292d
When you use spread sheets a lot, much of what makes you productive is that you know exactly what Excel will do. Like yes I know it's going to try to increment when actually I want to fill this column with 1s or whatever, but I can hold ctrl and override it and all is good.
With copilot, you will never be sure what it's going to do. I feel like it would slow me down even if it guessed right 90% of the time.
sudo@programming.dev · 36 pts · 292d
That's not just limited to excel. The basic value of computers is how deterministic they are. AI is just probability programs that are reintroduce chaos into the system.
shalafi@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 292d
That's why I got into computers as an 80s kid. You mean it does exactly as I say and any fuck ups are on me?! Let's go!
I can see my small children growing up to never know that's how it used to be and any fuck ups are on AI. Just how computers work. 🤷🏻
bdonvr@thelemmy.club · 7 pts · 292d
Yeah. Using it to help write functions is one thing. Using it to actually calculate.... Lmao
sudo@programming.dev · 5 pts · 292d
I'm pretty sure it just replaces itself with what it thinks is the correct Excel expression. That way the use can audit and correct the AI's work (and Microsoft isn't liable for miscalculations). Firing off to co-pilot every evaluation would be insanely irresponsible.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 15 pts · 291d
Ah yes financial crisis, those one in a lifetime events that only affect poors that are manufactured because it is also a cash injection for the needy rich slop
DupaCycki@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
Once in a lifetime if the life expectancy is 25 years.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 3 pts · 290d
This one is looking to clock in at toddler level
menas@lemmy.wtf · 8 pts · 291d
Well it seems it kind of already have happen. The austerity in the European Union have been justified by an excel error. Of course, the lack of control of conclusion that please the bourgeoisie is not a coincidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItGMz0ERvcw
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz · 7 pts · 291d
1 is a string, 2 and 3 are integers.
kunaltyagi@programming.dev · 2 pts · 290d
Is this javascript?
rf_@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 292d
The next flash crash will be caused by AI
umbrella@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 291d
Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 290d
I am wrong and Microsoft is even dummer then i thought to allow this.
FYI: this image is fake.The sentiment is true but there is no such thing as a =Copilot() command.Source: My work gave me a pro license and i could not replicate this. It still absolutely sucks in every conceivable way compared with claude.The only other way is if this is a region exclusive update but even then its questionable because the implication of those cells updating live could be exploited to be very expensive for ms.ShatteredMotion@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 290d
There absolutely is a =Copilot() function, but only available in the beta version of Excel. It is also officially documented: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-5849821b-755d-4030-a38b-9e20be0cbf62
Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org · 13 pts · 290d
BRB, gonna bankrupt a mega corporation real quick.
ivanovsky@lemmy.sdf.org · 9 pts · 290d
Looks like the screenshot uses the formula wrong (no context cells passed), but still... And the docs warn you not to use it for any numerical or high stakes/financial tasks lol "DO NOT USE IF ACCURACY IS IMPORTANT TO YOU" 😂
ShatteredMotion@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 289d
The context is optional. But without context, copilot has nothing to work on. So the correct answer should be:
„Are you stupid?! Which numbers are you talking about?“ instead of „sure thing, the sum of nothing is clearly 15!“
SailorFuzz@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 290d
"things are only true if I experience them"
Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org · 8 pts · 290d
There is no need to be overly dramatic. As far as i was aware i had the latest version and highest tier license making me assume i could actually test this.
I swallow my words when provided with proof. And i will take an experienced person their world in fields I don’t have experience myself.
There are a lot of jokes around that get mis interpreted as real facts on the current internet. You also should not automatically belief stuff online. Critical thinking and doing your own research are still important even when considering that you can fuck that part up.
Throskie@midwest.social · 1 pts · 291d