5 posts tagged with "AI"

AI add-ins for Excel now fall into a few practical families. The most visible category is the general-purpose Excel AI assistant: a chat or task-pane agent that can write formulas, explain workbook logic, clean data, summarize ranges, create charts, and sometimes edit the workbook directly. This is the best starting point for most end users who want a broad productivity boost without committing to a specific industry workflow.

Most Excel files are already applications in disguise. They have inputs, rules, exceptions, and repeated handoffs. What they usually do not have is an interface built for the job people are actually trying to do.

Tool Builder enables you to create standalone HTML web applications using AI (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) and run them directly within your Excel workbook. Your spreadsheet becomes both the web server and the database. You ask an AI tool to generate a small single-file web app, paste it into Tool Builder, and run it directly in the workbook. The workbook stays the source of truth, but you get a custom UI tailored to your workflow.

Spreadsheets have long been the workhorse of data organization, calculation, and analysis. From simple budgets to complex financial models, their grid-based structure provides a powerful way to manage information. However, dealing with unstructured text, complex data cleaning, pattern recognition beyond simple formulas, and generating insights often required manual effort or specialized tools outside the spreadsheet environment.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) directly into spreadsheet functions is changing this paradigm. Now, users can leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) and other AI techniques to perform tasks that were previously difficult or impossible within the confines of rows and columns. This document explores the diverse applications of AI in spreadsheets, transforming them from static data containers into dynamic tools for insight generation, automation, and enhanced productivity.

Discover how AI-powered functions like AI_ASK, AI_EXTRACT, AI_FORMAT, and others are revolutionizing spreadsheet workflows by enabling natural language interaction, intelligent data extraction, and automated pattern recognition. These capabilities transform spreadsheets into powerful tools for insight generation, data processing, and workflow automation across diverse business domains.

Azure Sentiment Analysis is a powerful cloud-based service that goes beyond simple sentiment scoring by providing aspect-based sentiment analysis, allowing you to extract sentiment for specific aspects of text (like "food" and "service" in customer reviews). This post demonstrates how to integrate this service with Excel using Python to analyze text data and return results in a tabular format.

Microsoft announced a new Excel TRANSLATE function that allows users to translate text directly within their spreadsheets. This function is similar to the GOOGLETRANSLATE function in Google Sheets and provides a convenient way to work with multilingual data in Excel. In this article, we'll explore the syntax and usage of the TRANSLATE function in Excel.

It is currently available to Beta Channel users on Windows and Mac. It is unclear if this will offer unlimited free use once it reaches GA.