Microsoft Is Retiring Excel’s COPILOT() Function After Just One Year
https://windowsreport.com/microsoft-is-retiring-excels-copilot-function-after-just-one-year/
https://windowsreport.com/microsoft-is-retiring-excels-copilot-function-after-just-one-year/
39 Comments
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub · 166 pts · 38d
I can't imagine anything more useless than a nondeterministic Excel function.
GreenCrunch@piefed.blahaj.zone · 70 pts · 38d
WHAT ABOUT RAND()? CHECKMATE AI HATERS!!! (/s)
terranoid@lemmy.cafe · 29 pts · 38d
Randomness can still be deterministic and useful. Monte Carlo simulations and whatnot
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 37d
That's the funny bit - unlike rand() which is purelly random with a uniform distribution - a feature which as you point out is useful - and is reliably so, copilot at best has a wild-ass distribution with an the extremelly high dimensionality of its shape which is not even reliable because every time it's initialization parameters are tweaked or any model weights change, the shape of that distribution changes.
It's like they were trying to come up with the thing that's the closest possible to mathematically useless.
StaticFalconar@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 37d
But what if that is what casinos use to be random?
dogdeanafternoon@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 37d
I read that some have cameras pointed at a wall of lava lamps, they combine random pixel data, with timestamps to the nanosecond, to generate random data.
Lodespawn@aussie.zone · 30 pts · 38d
What, you don't appreciate when your excel function just makes shit up? Weird ..
egrets@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 38d
I realize this is the wrong community to post it in, but I can imagine it being useful for things like summarization and cursory sentiment analysis, and perhaps for chaotic test data generation.
As with all AI, though, it's a wildly risky tool as it requires the user to understand its limitations and fallibility (as well as the million other issues AI brings with it).
Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 37d
I feel like that boils down to "I want a chart, but in words instead of visualization."
jj4211@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 37d
I suppose the idea would be like AVG, but for free form text comment cells. Can't really chart that.
Of course it would be non deterministic left as a "formula", so it's still a bad idea to encode that way, but guess they could have a "summarize this column" feature and then the user does as they will with the result.
Though having comments in a column in a spreadsheet has always seemed like a weird format choice.
egrets@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 37d
Kind of - it's the step that makes the data uniform and (nominally) useful so it can then be aggregated and reported on.
bus_factor@lemmy.world · -14 pts · 38d
It has some reasonable use-cases when dealing with text, the problem is that it's extremely easy for idiots to misuse it, either by trying to do math or by not supplying any cells in the optional second argument.
Not requiring the second argument was nuts, and it should probably have refused any query resulting in a number as well.
wewbull@feddit.uk · 31 pts · 38d
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 20 pts · 38d
Ah yes, those idiots trying to do math in Excel.
im_fine_sandy@nord.pub · 6 pts · 38d
Or trying to do text in excel?!
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 37d
You may not like it, but Excel has long been the tool of choice for people who should really use a database but already know how to use this nice hammer.
COPILOT()was marketed as a tool where you could pull in a bunch of text fields and do crude sentiment analysis or summaries of the individual fields, for example.captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 37d
I remember in 8th grade about 26 years ago being taught how to use Microsoft Works, including its word processor, spreadsheet, and its database.
Yeah for those who think it's a new problem for Microsoft to have multiple teams working on different overlapping projects, they've been doing that shit since at least the 90's. At one point in time they had at least three word processors in active development: MS Word, MS Works, and Wordpad.
MS Works was kind of MS Office Junior. It was packaged as one app instead of a bundle of several but you'd choose which function you'd want to use right now. It had a spreadsheet and the main difference between it and Excel was you were limited to one worksheet. And it had a database function which visually looked a lot like a spreadsheet, nothing like Access. Good enough for Dad to catalog his VHS collection. Except they stopped supporting works years ago, I think Word and Excel can open Works files but I don't know about Works database files are rather esoteric now. Then there's MS Access which is itself being killed off.
There's a rather big gulf between "just slightly misuse Excel" and "learn SQL."
bus_factor@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 37d
Idiots using a function without understanding what it actually does. Plenty of functions in Excel operate on text.
jballs@sh.itjust.works · 44 pts · 37d
I can't imagine why they're taking this function out
Akuchimoya@startrek.website · 4 pts · 37d
Is this a real screen capture or are you having me on? Because did someone really ship this out????
jballs@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 37d
Came from this post about 10 months ago.
hexagonwin@lemmy.today · 40 pts · 38d
NOO! IT BREAKS MY WORKFLOW!! /s
notabot@piefed.social · 40 pts · 38d
Don't worry, you can just replace it with a call to
RAND()and scale it appropriately.dumnezero@piefed.social · 26 pts · 37d
LibreOffice Calc glows harder
brown567@sh.itjust.works · 22 pts · 37d
Turns out, "Math Program" didn't need a "Bullshit" button! Who knew?
BigDiction@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 37d
Jesus is it really true that there are ~3 isolated teams working any mainline product at a given point? Using this stuff on iOS feels like it.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 37d
I think they may have some independent teams for the translations as well. Otherwise why the fuck would they translate function names?
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · 5 pts · 37d
They have been translating function names as far back as I can remember... Spreadsheets are meant for the general office worker who doesn't necessarily speak English
AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social · 19 pts · 38d
Wonder whose was the excel sheet in which someone asked copilot to do some math and resulted in a few millions lost by "a honest mistake" of the artificial idiocy...
the16bitgamer@programming.dev · 18 pts · 38d
How expensive was this to run for them? I kind of wanted to test it since there is a few outputs which would’ve been cool to see it be generated.
But I can imagine a 200 row sheet with COPILOT() being slow and very expensive to have.
Oh well
Jesusaurus@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 37d
And not even guaranteed to be accurate
the16bitgamer@programming.dev · 1 pts · 37d
There are some use cases where good enough works. Especially if your company doesn’t let you have access to code
zbyte64@awful.systems · 4 pts · 37d
There's "good enough" and then there's "it worked on my machine that one time but everytime someone else runs the function we get a different result"
rumba@lemmy.zip · 14 pts · 37d
God please let microsoft be the canary in the coalmine for an AI collapese
InnerScientist@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 38d
Add it to the list
FreddiesLantern@leminal.space · 2 pts · 37d
I have added the list to the files that are deleted and have cleared the recycle bin.
What else can I do for you?
InnerScientist@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 37d
https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
halezinflames@lemmus.org · 6 pts · 37d
So when's OnlyOffice retiring its ridiculous "AI Mode" next?
you_are_dust@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 37d
Thank fuck. It might only have been a year, but it's felt like 10. I use Excel a lot for work and copilot is only detrimental to it.