Top comment from the last time this was posted pointed out how the image is cropped on the left. We are most definitely looking at rows 11-14 and there are numbers above that are not being shown.
I just want them to remove the god awful copilot button that showed up in the corner on top of cells in my spreadsheet with no way to move or hide it. It’s not even on the ribbon anymore where I can ignore it. Fuckin’ pricks.
It's a lot simpler than that. =COPILOT() can only see cells provided in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide one. It's just giving you what a typical answer to "compute the sum of the numbers above" is.
Storytime. I tried to use copilot to get some rather convoluted dataset analyzed in Excel. Not a huge task, but basically I wanted it to count me the occurrences of certain values, grouped by that value. Of course that’s easy with Pivot, and there’s probably also some formula for that, but it wasn’t very urgent, so I figured I’d see what Copilot could do.
Now of course I didn’t want to use that =COPILOT() formula, but instead asked Copilot to create me a formula to correctly count how often each value occurs. So it created this multiple lines long formula, which from first glance seemed plausible (though way overcomplicated). I asked it to insert this into cell F13. „Of course“, it said — and then proceeded to do nothing. Confronted with this, it tried again, and failed. After some asking why it didn’t just go that, it told me that this is not possible in Excel in Mac. I’d have to use the web version of Excel. WTF? Why doesn’t the fully featured version do this? Well, of course: Microsoft doesn’t like Apple too much. So I tried copy pasting the formula and failed. Some syntax error cropped up. I asked Copilot about this, and it came back with a typical „oh sorry, my bad, here is the correct formula“ and the same formula again. Of course this failed. And since I didn’t want to debug this stupid thing (the error message of course also didn’t give any indication what exactly could be wrong), I just created a Pivot and got my result in seconds.
Now this is only one of many experiences I had when trying to really use that 365 Copilot for anything useful. Maybe I should write a book about it. And then ask Copilot to write a book about it and put this into the epilogue.
I remember my final task before getting laid off from Coinbase was to use Copilot to write unit tests for a 70k-line Kubernetes deployer written in golang. Without fail, it would regularly give me unit tests checking whether .onclick() was working for a given function...in a Kubernetes deployer. I tried to report that to management and they told me that I was using it wrong and fired me.
It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for =COPILOT() says a few things which are relevant to understand what we're seeing here:
You're not supposed to use it for math
It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument
In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they're just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request "sum the numbers above". And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.
People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.
There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.
True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn't figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it's result though
But haven't the makers of Excel said in the past that you shouldn't use Excel for non-math stuff because that's not what it's designed for? Now their putting in a "tool" that's useless for math stuff?
Is there a layperson-accessible way to paste a large number of email adresses and concatenate them with "; " that's more recommended than spreadsheet software?.
This is true for every field: people knowledgeable in that field know that there are better ways to do it then AI and easily spot the errors AI makes. AI only looks good in fields you are ignorant about.
The issue isn't about what it can and can't do, it's that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and "fix" my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won't it give me the "shut up and stay the fuck out of my way" option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn't been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I'd already entered. No, copilot you don't know what I'm doing. Clippy was less intrusive.
That sounds like a different thing than =COPILOT (). There are like 75 completely different things all called Copilot, because Microsoft are masters at naming things.
Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71...
Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it's just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn't think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense... Wait holy shit... I got it
2+3 = 5
1 = 1
Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) "1"+(str) "5" = "15"
I'm betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can't confirm as I don't use excel but that seems to be the issue.
No, it's a lot more basic than that. You provide =COPILOT() the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.
Wait... Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can't see the data in excel? That's insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don't see why excel wouldn't be able to...
Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you're working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.
Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I'm betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.
When they called the function, they didn’t specify any cells. The copilot function, like any other Excel function, cannot see cells that aren’t given to it.
The second argument is blank, so it just Gave a typical answer to a sum question.
If people stopped trying to make it something it's not and built it as a proper tool, this is one of the few things AI is good for. It can proccess data quite well, or could. Because of all that's being shoved in the hallucinations are getting worse, but I've been able to use it to proccess data sets with very specific instructions. Saved me hours of tedious work.
But a way to organize and proccess data faster isn't exciting for investors so
60 Comments
Bubs12@lemmy.cafe · 49 pts · 92d
Top comment from the last time this was posted pointed out how the image is cropped on the left. We are most definitely looking at rows 11-14 and there are numbers above that are not being shown.
I just want them to remove the god awful copilot button that showed up in the corner on top of cells in my spreadsheet with no way to move or hide it. It’s not even on the ribbon anymore where I can ignore it. Fuckin’ pricks.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 92d
It's a lot simpler than that.
=COPILOT()can only see cells provided in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide one. It's just giving you what a typical answer to "compute the sum of the numbers above" is.smeenz@lemmy.nz · 9 pts · 92d
In other words, they may as well have given it "make up a number"
... though with all the hallucinations, it would probably return "elephant" intermittently
conartistpanda@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 91d
Undress me
BennyInc@feddit.org · 34 pts · 92d
Storytime. I tried to use copilot to get some rather convoluted dataset analyzed in Excel. Not a huge task, but basically I wanted it to count me the occurrences of certain values, grouped by that value. Of course that’s easy with Pivot, and there’s probably also some formula for that, but it wasn’t very urgent, so I figured I’d see what Copilot could do. Now of course I didn’t want to use that =COPILOT() formula, but instead asked Copilot to create me a formula to correctly count how often each value occurs. So it created this multiple lines long formula, which from first glance seemed plausible (though way overcomplicated). I asked it to insert this into cell F13. „Of course“, it said — and then proceeded to do nothing. Confronted with this, it tried again, and failed. After some asking why it didn’t just go that, it told me that this is not possible in Excel in Mac. I’d have to use the web version of Excel. WTF? Why doesn’t the fully featured version do this? Well, of course: Microsoft doesn’t like Apple too much. So I tried copy pasting the formula and failed. Some syntax error cropped up. I asked Copilot about this, and it came back with a typical „oh sorry, my bad, here is the correct formula“ and the same formula again. Of course this failed. And since I didn’t want to debug this stupid thing (the error message of course also didn’t give any indication what exactly could be wrong), I just created a Pivot and got my result in seconds.
Now this is only one of many experiences I had when trying to really use that 365 Copilot for anything useful. Maybe I should write a book about it. And then ask Copilot to write a book about it and put this into the epilogue.
PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social · 10 pts · 91d
I remember my final task before getting laid off from Coinbase was to use Copilot to write unit tests for a 70k-line Kubernetes deployer written in golang. Without fail, it would regularly give me unit tests checking whether
.onclick()was working for a given function...in a Kubernetes deployer. I tried to report that to management and they told me that I was using it wrong and fired me.discocactus@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 91d
Upvote for the username. Also better luck in your future endeavors.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 91d
Wow. I wish your story was more surprising.
It boggles my mind that people trust Coinbase with their money.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 92d
It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for
=COPILOT()says a few things which are relevant to understand what we're seeing here:In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they're just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request "sum the numbers above". And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
PineRune@lemmy.world · 42 pts · 92d
Keep in mind that if you allow a user to make this mistake, people will DEFINITELY make this mistake. A lot.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 14 pts · 92d
And if that's true, just imagine something any more compex, that could get lost amid the rest of the slop for a long time
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 92d
Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 92d
Every job is just some sort of troubleshooting, it just makes it harder to do when your manual is making stuff up
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 92d
That is true for a lot of things, particularly every AI feature ever.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 92d
Dont you just tell the AI to make no mistakes
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca · 21 pts · 92d
.... You aren't supposed to use it for math.... In excel? What is the point?
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 92d
People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.
There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 92d
True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn't figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it's result though
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 92d
But haven't the makers of Excel said in the past that you shouldn't use Excel for non-math stuff because that's not what it's designed for? Now their putting in a "tool" that's useless for math stuff?
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 92d
Is there a layperson-accessible way to paste a large number of email adresses and concatenate them with "; " that's more recommended than spreadsheet software?.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 91d
And what do you need AI to do with that list?
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 91d
Not AI but it is non-math stuff in Excel.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 91d
I don't know, I'm not that deep in Excel lore. But sometimes things change.
hayvan@piefed.world · 6 pts · 92d
Big part of the problem with AI features is that way too many people believe they are silver bullet for everything and they are marketed like that.
Computer savvy people know better ways of doing math and can figure out that context is needed.
Overwhelming majority of people, including bosses and managers, are too lazy and ignorant to care about the points you mention.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 92d
This is true for every field: people knowledgeable in that field know that there are better ways to do it then AI and easily spot the errors AI makes. AI only looks good in fields you are ignorant about.
Krudler@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 92d
If it's "not supposed to be used for math" then it should pop a modal that says "I don't do math".
Wolf314159@startrek.website · 3 pts · 92d
The issue isn't about what it can and can't do, it's that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and "fix" my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won't it give me the "shut up and stay the fuck out of my way" option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn't been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I'd already entered. No, copilot you don't know what I'm doing. Clippy was less intrusive.
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 92d
The reason they have Copilot act without you requesting it is so they can show their investors Copilot is being used.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 91d
That sounds like a different thing than
=COPILOT (). There are like 75 completely different things all called Copilot, because Microsoft are masters at naming things.sqw@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 91d
if you're not supposed to use it for math, maybe it shouldn't produce numbers/formulas.
Avicenna@programming.dev · 23 pts · 92d
1+2=12
12+3=15
seems legit
spizzat2@lemmy.zip · 8 pts · 92d
Also, working upward, 3+2=5, "1"+5="15".
I wonder which "inspired" path it chose.
Ashiette@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 91d
So it's JavaScript. Noted...
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works · 15 pts · 92d
It obviously added "A+1+2+3" and got 15 after looking up the typical value of A.
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 22 pts · 92d
And it was still wrong
vrek@programming.dev · 13 pts · 92d
Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71...
Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it's just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn't think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense... Wait holy shit... I got it
2+3 = 5
1 = 1
Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) "1"+(str) "5" = "15"
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 92d
It didn't consider any of the numbers, because the user didn't provide the context argument to the function.
vrek@programming.dev · 1 pts · 92d
I'm betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can't confirm as I don't use excel but that seems to be the issue.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 92d
No, it's a lot more basic than that. You provide
=COPILOT()the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.vrek@programming.dev · 3 pts · 92d
Wait... Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can't see the data in excel? That's insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don't see why excel wouldn't be able to...
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 92d
Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you're working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.
vrek@programming.dev · 1 pts · 92d
Wow, yeah most people who want to use a function like this will mess that up...
zikzak025@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 92d
Or A can be 10 in hexadecimal, but that wouldn't fit either.
vrek@programming.dev · 2 pts · 92d
Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I'm betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 92d
How many gigawatts did it take for you to figure that out?
vrek@programming.dev · 2 pts · 92d
1.21 jiggawatts!
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 92d
Great Scott!!
MakingWork@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 92d
The typical value of A is 9, according to copilot.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org · 1 pts · 92d
Off by 1. Not too bad.
relativelyrobin@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 92d
When they called the function, they didn’t specify any cells. The copilot function, like any other Excel function, cannot see cells that aren’t given to it.
The second argument is blank, so it just Gave a typical answer to a sum question.
AvocadoCumToast@lemmy.zip · 11 pts · 92d
Thumbs up the bad and the good, with about 10% thumbs down randomly. Poison their data set.
arrow74@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 92d
If people stopped trying to make it something it's not and built it as a proper tool, this is one of the few things AI is good for. It can proccess data quite well, or could. Because of all that's being shoved in the hallucinations are getting worse, but I've been able to use it to proccess data sets with very specific instructions. Saved me hours of tedious work.
But a way to organize and proccess data faster isn't exciting for investors so
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 92d
How is this easier than just typing in sum(a1:a3)??
glibg10b@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 92d
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social · 1 pts · 92d
Yeah, the "skill barrier"
OpenStars@piefed.social · 1 pts · 92d
Bc this way gives profits to AI...
homes@piefed.world · 3 pts · 92d
Whenever I’m feeling suicidal, I remind myself that I have never had to use Excel
It doesn’t always work, but it often works
Edit: although, I did have a brief affair with Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes, back in the day