On the first glance this seems to be a very bad idea. But re-readig this:

> Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets, or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.

this might just be an excellent tool for refactoring Excel sheets into something more robust and maintainable. And making a bunch of suits redundant.

On a related note, has anyone found a good local LLM option for working with Excel files?

Here's my use case: I have a set of responses from a survey and want to perform sentiment analysis on them, classify them, etc. Ideally, I'd like to feed them one at a time to a local LLM with a prompt like: "Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic...etc".

If I dump the whole spreadsheet into ChatGPT, I found that because of the context window, it can get "lazy"; while with a local LLM, I could just literally prompt it one row at a time to accomplish my goal, even if it takes a little longer in terms of GPU and wall-clock time.

However, I can't find anything that works off the shelf like this. It seems like a prime use case for local models.

Version control and meaningful diffs for .xlsx will be in high demand in a few months

HA!

I've worked at MULTIPLE million dollar firms whose entire business relies on 10 Excel workbooks that were created 30 years ago by a person who is either passed on or retired.

Give users who aren't intimately knowledgeable with their source material ai, and you're asking for trouble.

The undo function has a history limit.

The real issue is: at what point are we going to stop chasing efficiency and profit at the sake of humanity?

Claude and OpenAI are built on stretched truths, stolen creativity and what-if statements.

The best thing that can come from this is unit tests for Excel.

LLMs work best when they can call tools (edit the sheet) and test their results in a loop.

It's like the "value seek" thing Excel has had since forever; "adjust these values until this cell is X"

Excel doesn't have any way to verify that every formula in that 60k line sheet is correct and someone hasn't accidentally replaced one with a static number for example.

IMO, a real solution here has to be hybrid, not full LLM, because these sheets can be massive and have very complicated structures. You want to be able to use the LLM to identify / map column headers, while using non-LLM tool calling to run Excel operations like SUMIFs or VLOOKUPs. One of the most important traits in these systems is consistency with slight variation in file layout, as so much Excel work involves consolidating / reconciling between reports made on a quarterly basis or produced by a variety of sources, with different reporting structures.

Disclosure: My company builds ingestion pipelines for large multi-tab Excel files, PDFs, and CSVs.

I’m decent at excel, but not amazing. I’ve tried again and again to use LLMs including Claude to solve specific, small, well defined problems in excel with a 0% success rate. My experience so far has been if I can’t do it LLMs can’t either.

If LLMs are a 6/10 right now at basic coding then they’re a 3/10 at excel from my experience.

Tough day to be an AI Excel add-in startup

Maybe this is how we get code versioning for Excel.

Git LFS for workbook + the following prompt :

“Create a commit explains what has changed in the workbook since the last commit. Be brief, but explain the change in business terms as well as code change terms.”