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Comment by browningstreet

10 days ago

I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.

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browningstreet

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samch  10 days ago

Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.

  • wkat4242  10 days ago

    Thanks for the tip. That function sounds pretty useful. I've been meaning to automate categorising manual survey responses in an excel file. And trying to do it through copilot studio (at my work we don't have access to a simple API option like ChatGPT offers). But if I could put a copilot prompt in every row that would be amazing.

btown  10 days ago

> terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called

Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets?

Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't?

I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan.

I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?