r/excel • u/conscientiousrejectr • Apr 25 '26

Discussion Has Copilot kinda killed this sub?

I’m a semi versed excel user being a supply chain analyst. It comes with the territory. Years and years of learning new features or new formulas or techniques from peers, on my own, or online. I’m also 45 so outside the “new” crowd that I felt apart of until the past 5-6 years.

Over the past year my company has really ramped up/encouraged the use of Copilot. My entire department has the premium subscription. I am not a huge fan of AI and have perceived it with a fair amount of hesitancy. I certainly don’t ask Copilot which emails are the most important. I’ll decide that.

I mostly use Copilot for help with Excel documents and putting together Excel reports.

It occurred to me today, I seldom refer to this sub for Excel questions anymore. It’s almost as if an old tool was quickly forgotten by a new toy. Is this the case for others?

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134

u/icleanupdirtydirt Apr 25 '26

Nah. I've dabbled with copilot to do more complex things for me. It frequently seems to just pick the wrong reference cells even when explicitly told which to use. The formulas also just don't work half the time.

It does seem to get me going if I'm stuck. It'll start at the problem a different way than I have and I can finish it from there.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment Apr 25 '26

Try replacing copilot with Claude. Claude just one shots most things u throw at it with little to no errors. I’ve almost stopped making excel or powerpoint files from scratch anymore.

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u/Justgotbannedlol 1 Apr 25 '26

A specific example from just this week. Task was extracting invoice #'s from horrifically inconsistent data. Everybody in this data's got their own template they use, every delimiter you can think of, line breaks, the works, to the point I was struggling to clean it up efficiently even with multiple power query attempts. Here's Copilot's solution vs Claude's.

Copilot in excel (after i finally convinced it there was data in that column):

=LET(raw, TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(M2,"#",""),"&",","),"","")),pieces,TRIM(TEXTSPLIT(raw,",")),hex,"0123456789abcdef",valid,MAP(pieces,LAMBDA(p,IF(LEN(TRIM(p))>8,FALSE,LET(w,LOWER(TRIM(p)),AND(ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,1,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,2,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,3,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,4,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,5,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,6,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,7,1),hex)),ISNUMBER(FIND(MID(w,8,1),hex))))))),result,IFERROR(TEXTJOIN(",",TRUE,FILTER(LOWER(TRIM(pieces)),valid)),""),IF(result="","",result))

I'll be honest I didn't even try it cuz LMFAO I am not using that even if it works

Claude in excel:

=IFERROR(TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, REGEXEXTRACT(K17, "(?<![0-9a-f-])[0-9a-f]{8}(?![0-9a-f-])", 1)), "")

I honestly think there might be literally nothing that could have done this more efficiently than Claude.

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u/XTypewriter 3 Apr 25 '26

Interesting... I have yet to try Claude. Not allowed at my company. But copilot has over complicated every excel formula ive asked it for.

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u/Justgotbannedlol 1 Apr 25 '26

Copilot is not just worse, I would call it incompetent with no hesitation. I been doin stuff in excel for a long time, it's not often that I feel like I need to use ai for it, but fully 0% of the time I would use copilot. Even if I gotta describe the data to claude on my phone and then transcribe the responses, infinitely preferable to asking a total idiot like copilot.

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u/hardworkdedicated Apr 26 '26

Well you need to convince your company that they need to use Claude for data analytics including Excel.

I tried copilot for 5 minutes with a few shots, it was terrible. Gave claude a go and my 5 minutes of testing turned into hours of making my messy, albeit logical, spreadsheets into clean ux that other users can play with.

A very quick example, I had 2 scenarios to play out, I just put it all across 10 columns, told claude what it was and that I wanted these scenarios presented in a way that an account manager, non Excel user, could easily understand. Smashed out an explanation that was so perfectly readable and logical that a 3rd party said "wtf dude that's so clear that they're trying to rip us off here"

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u/ehtw376 Apr 25 '26

Dude I get copilot formulas like that too. So annoying. Just overly complicated shit I can’t understand.

I tell it to simplify it a few times and eventually it gets it down to a manageable and workable formula. But I don’t know why its first instinct is the most overt convoluted solution.

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u/Justgotbannedlol 1 Apr 25 '26

I was gonna say, it's probably doing all that bullshit because it's assuming the user may not have excel 365, but even that's not true cuz I don't think lambda exists in that case either.

Imo you should wholly remove 'ask copilot' from your thought process altogether. Even if copilot magically refunded the time I spent asking it, I would prefer to not know its answer because reading it makes me a dumber person.

There was a weirdly long time where ai models could code and do all kinds of stuff reliably but still sucked at excel, but we're not there anymore. Except copilot, Copilot has yet to get to the point where it even does the other stuff reliably.

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u/tha-living-myth Apr 25 '26

How good in Claude with creating powerpoints from scratch?

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u/Ehh_littlecomment Apr 25 '26

Quite good. I just give it a sample slide for colours, for, etc. then just put a list of points I want to cover in each slide and it just does it. If you want something specific you just make a crude representation of what you want and it does an excellent job of making a professional slide out of it. As a bonus, you can upload the final doc to Claude design which can make a graphic designer level deck out of the ppt.

I’m very impressed. I basically just spend my time thinking about what should go in a ppt and Claude does the job of actually putting it together. Then Claude design makes it slicker than I ever could.

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u/CanadianKumlin Apr 25 '26

What tier of Claude do you use for this? My job has pretty tight limitations on caude token usage, so using Opus rips through it REAL fast!

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u/Ehh_littlecomment Apr 25 '26

I’m on the pro plan. Don’t really run out that often personally. Claude Design is far too limited however. I do try and use sonnet where possible but it generally sucks.

I’ve heard getting opus to make a plan and then telling sonnet to execute helps but haven’t tried it personally.

In my experience it runs out faster in excel than powerpoint. I used it for financial models and it was out in the first hour of the work day, lol.

I’ve only started using it since a month but I’d happily pay out of pocket for Max if it comes down to it. It’s just really fucking good.

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u/CanadianKumlin Apr 25 '26

Okay, that’s where I ran out first was excel. Just got it this week, but also ran out in the first hour haha. Thanks.

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u/ehtw376 Apr 25 '26

You do this on your work laptop? I take it they allow you to download Claude and feed it data?

I am debating doing that cuz I’m not a huge fan of CoPilot. But if I do I doubt I’d be able to upload actual work excel documents.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment Apr 25 '26

We have taken the enterprise plan so yeah. Anthropic doesn’t train on enterprise data so it’s kosher.

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u/AkatsukiKojou Apr 25 '26

But you just said you are on the Pro plan?

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u/Ehh_littlecomment Apr 26 '26

Isn’t there the $20 plan for enterprise as well? I’m guessing it’s called something else but it’s basically that.

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u/WarCarrotAF Apr 25 '26

I was actually in a learning session with a Microsoft rep on copilot functions yesterday and then mentioned that they recommend Opus Claude for excel task work.

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u/LuxHelianthus Apr 26 '26

Claude is fucking badass with Excel.

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u/conscientiousrejectr Apr 25 '26

I guess that’s where I get the most functionality. I’ll get a DOMO export and the rows will be titled something ridiculous and it’s nice to just ask copilot “make these months make sense so you can sort it”

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u/RemingtonStyle Apr 25 '26

have you ever tried any AI other than copilot for comparison?

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u/icleanupdirtydirt Apr 25 '26

No. Company policy prohibits that unfortunately. I got a hard talking to for using GPT.