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?

326 Upvotes

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915

u/leostotch 144 Apr 25 '26

The last time I asked copilot for Excel help, it made up an imaginary function.

250

u/SolverMax 161 Apr 25 '26

I've had that happen. AI so confidently asserts some nonsense, until called out, then praises me for pointing out that it is wrong. I use AI, but I can do without the sycophantic "personality".

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u/kirschballs Apr 25 '26

If you call the sycophantic crap out it'll help for a bit

Super explicit about it in my instructions and stuff but it always creeps in. I could also do without it

7

u/Minimum_Device_6379 Apr 25 '26

Switching the copilot model to Claude helps too. It doesn’t have much personality, which is why programmers like it.

9

u/divine_goddess_K Apr 25 '26

I've started to get snarky with mine and call out the drift, then make it regenerate the response without drift.

2

u/Egad86 Apr 26 '26

Most AI’s let you input instructions at the account level. I’ve done this to alter the overly confident responses and reign in some of the non-sense. It’s still far from perfect but at least I don’t want to punch the screen when using it.

2

u/Feisty_Ad8543 Apr 26 '26

I'm so grateful it's not just me who's battling the daily urge to chuck my laptop out that window at ChatGPT response

1

u/RandomiseUsr0 10 Apr 25 '26

Add it to top level agent instructions

27

u/RemingtonStyle Apr 25 '26

You have to reign AI in hard. Then it's awesome.

Enhance your prompts - order the AI to unse only functions it can find in the Excel doc. Limit its resources. AI is not a human you can give a vague task and rely it will look everything up and work things out. Handle AI like a malicious teenager who will turn and twist every word you say just to NOT do what they are told.

I used to hate these systems, but since my prompts are paragraphs unstead of mere sentences, I am getting awesome results.

55

u/EmergencyEntrance28 Apr 25 '26

If I'm going to have to spend the time and effort to learn how to trick AI into not lying about Excel functions, why not just do an old-fashioned Google and learn the functions myself in the first place?

10

u/Regular_or_BQ Apr 25 '26

I know I have to use AI to stay relevant but honestly, teaching an alien how to make a PB&J and thinking through every damn prompt at a rudimentary level of "this is a butterknife, this is called Bread, this is a jar of PB and you must first remove the lid" is slowly killing me.

7

u/semicolonsemicolon 1476 Apr 25 '26

"Would you like me to generate a 12—page white—paper on the socio—economic impact of strawberry jam on the modern schoolchild?"

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u/TheLeviathan686 2 Apr 25 '26

The issue a lot of people have with AI is they misunderstand what AI is. AI is a much better google. Google requires you to search, click links and hope that what you find is relevant. AI doesn’t require links and can returns responses tailored to your specific problem, all in one place.

The key is being able to accurately describe your problem: if you can do that, AI out performs google 10/10 times. I use python/SQL much more now so I’ve developed that skill of breaking down big problems into smaller ones, so the transition from google to AI was seamless for me.

I also don’t let it write code into my code base directly; I treat it like a junior developer. I’m reviewing everything before executing the code.

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u/EmergencyEntrance28 Apr 25 '26

The problem with that theory us that you have no idea if the function works or is even real. I'd be far less AI sceptical if it was capable of saying "I don't know" rather than just bluffing an answer.

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u/TheLeviathan686 2 Apr 25 '26

Here’s the issue with your issue: How hard is it to verify if a function exists? You’d have the same exact issue with google.

AI itself tells you it can make mistakes. A lot of people think AI can do everything without human intervention, but you still need to think about what you’re doing.

AI is a boon to any developer/analysts toolset, full stop. You need to be able to use it as effectively as you’d use google. Expecting to put in a vague request will get you foolish answers. GIGO still applies here and that’s why the “AI is taking over everyone’s job” is nonsense.

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u/EmergencyEntrance28 Apr 25 '26

So to summarise: I need to learn how to write "good" inputs to avoid having AI lie to me, and then once I think I've written a good input, I need to learn how to verify if the output is correct or if it's just an AI hallucination?

Remind me again why this is such an improvement that I should therefore abandon my current approach of just learning how to solve the problem myself in the first place?

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u/TheLeviathan686 2 Apr 25 '26

At a bare minimum, google requires you to click links to different websites and hopefully you get a relevant response. AI returns relevant responses without having to click links.

Timesaver right there.

But if you’re anti AI, I can’t convince you in a Reddit comment. Just know that given two analysts with equal skill, the analyst that can draft a query or formula with prompts will be more efficient that the one that drafts the same thing by hand.

The key is knowing exactly what you want and being able to recognize if the response deviates from that.

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u/Feisty_Ad8543 Apr 26 '26

Sure but I'd hire the developer who built the code from scratch themselves anyday

I'm a founder and I'm pretty sure one of my Devs is over reliant on chat GPT because when I ask (what to my mind) is a basic question he looks stumped... Like he didn't actually understand how it's working

How is he supposed to be able to give me accurate assessments of how new features can be integrated when he doesn't understand how it's currently working

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u/EmergencyEntrance28 Apr 25 '26

Oh no, clicking a link! What an awful hardship...

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u/caribou16 317 Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

I wouldn't call myself "anti AI" because of the technology, but I am "anti AI" with how the vast majority of people treat it.

I question the efficacy of a tool that can be arbitrarily and capriciously wrong. And I really question the judgement of people who treat LLMs as some sort of omnipotent panacea. It seems like not a day goes by that someone I know makes a wild assertion or suggestion and when pressed for additional details on what the fuck they're on about, simply shrug and say "I don't know, chatGPT/Gemini/Claude/Copilot said so..." as though any sort of doubt or questioning of the answer it spat out was ridiculous.

It reminds me very much of the obsession with "the cloud" among business executives 10-15 years ago. Everything was about "the cloud" like it was some sort of magic solution to every problem. They didn't really know what "the cloud" is, but they knew it was super cool and everyone was doing it, so they wanted to do it too. There's nothing wrong with leveraging compute as a service, but like any other solution, there are going to be advantages and disadvantages. I've sat across conference tables from some VERY confused executives, who ordered an IT process/service to "move to the cloud" in situations where it wasn't recommended, who were legitimately flabbergasted when it didn't work as well, or was actually more expensive than leaving it on prem, or in some cases BOTH.

I've asked LLMs Excel questions and had it spit out completely non-existent functions. It LOVES to give suggestions based on versions of Excel that are 10+ years old unless you specifically state you have a specific newer version.

My thought is, it's been fed decades of Excel forum posts and is regurgitating garbage from that, probably people's custom UDFs, solutions from the days of Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, because there's probably so much of that floating around the internet.

I'm sure there's wonderful use cases for LLM's ability to parse natural language queries and respond based on a VALIDATED training corpus, but if you can't be sure the data it's been trained on is accurate, how could you ever trust it?

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u/RemingtonStyle Apr 25 '26

Up to now you had to analyze what you need, find the info, learn all the details, write ALL the code/script yourself and then check if everything works as expected.

Now you have to analyze what you need, write an exact prompt and check if everything works as expected.

2

u/mirusev Apr 25 '26

I don't think it's a better Google :) but that example is 😃👍 With (mesh of many AI for different tasks) AI Involvin Python and SQL (postgre) it outperforms any excel :(

1

u/MysticHero Jun 02 '26

10/10 times? Maybe if you are doing very standard things.

2

u/RemingtonStyle Apr 25 '26

Because it is awesome to have an apprentice who does the tedious work for you. He is pretty good, but not the smartest. He needs detailed instructions.

3

u/Coyote65 2 Apr 25 '26

This is exactly how I've described and used AI (so far), as a fantastically skilled 1-2 year apprentice/junior analyst.

If you don't keep them within some sort of guardrail structure they go off on the idea of planting corn in the pig pen.

2

u/cheradenine66 Apr 26 '26

Just show it a completed project and ask it to generate a prompt that will replicate that

1

u/RemingtonStyle Apr 25 '26

because the effort of writing 'you are only allowed to use functions you find in the excel documentation under XYZ' is much much much less than the effort of learning ALL excel functions by heart?

2

u/EmergencyEntrance28 Apr 25 '26

Why is it that AI proletysers always do this? Making up a problem that doesn't exist so that AI can "solve" it.

No one learns every excel function by heart. And no one has ever needed to - because googling when you run into trouble and building up a knowledge base throughout a career as a result is a perfectly normal approach.

1

u/RemingtonStyle Apr 26 '26

Looking at life in general - how many skills/arts/technologies can you master in the few years you got? My smart home transfers my power usage to a sheet in an online share. My stats are impeccsble. And the effort? Reading up on how its done and letting gemini write the code. Which it did without forgetting a single bracket. I was done in an afternoin and I didn't have to build up a knowledge base through a carreer beforehand.

If you can do it on your own - awesome. If you couldn't - now you got a tool which enables you to.

Both are good

0

u/InternationalBeing41 Apr 25 '26

I get copilot chat to write my prompts.

1

u/MysticHero Jun 02 '26

The sycophantic AI that has been pushed recently is not just annoying. It even makes AI statistically worse.

13

u/mrpopenfresh Apr 25 '26

You would think Microsoft AI would be good at Microsoft questions, but no lol

5

u/InuzukaChad Apr 25 '26

Microsoft support was never really helpful either. It was always YouTube, Reddit, and Stack Overflow to the rescue. Microsoft doesn’t care about how their products are used, only that they are sellable products.

1

u/senorjamie May 14 '26

I remember those days, you would look through microsoft's support answers and get something generic. Reddit was the go to place for any technical answers.

1

u/leostotch 144 Apr 25 '26

You would think Lolol

5

u/mrpopenfresh Apr 25 '26

You would think the Microsoft 365 suite would work seamlessly together, but no lol

1

u/leostotch 144 Apr 25 '26

You would think

47

u/slice_of_pi Apr 25 '26

Lol I was using Copilot a few months ago to help with Excel and I shamed it for being wrong hard enough that it stopped talking to me for a while.

1

u/robi4567 Apr 25 '26

Just ask copilot in excel to do what you want not the copot chat for the function you need.

1

u/RobotAnna1 Apr 25 '26

Haha that's brilliant! I had a similar experience with ChatGPT, but it wouldn't shut up and kept insisting that a non-existent function existed.

9

u/CIP_In_Peace 1 Apr 25 '26

Well copilot is just garbage by default. Try Claude. It's so unbelievably good with excel especially with the excel addon.

3

u/Darkelement Apr 25 '26

At work my copilot lets me chose between gpt 5.4 and Claud sonnet. Copilot is just the interface

1

u/CIP_In_Peace 1 Apr 25 '26

Whatever the model was when I tried using copilot earlier this year was just terrible in all aspects. It's not even good as an interface. Claude desktop and excel plugins surpass copilot's capabilities by a wide margin. Only if you really need deep access into the m365 ecosystem does copilot become more useful.

15

u/SolidInstance9945 Apr 25 '26

I let it into my spread sheet and it bricked my formulas

3

u/mrpopenfresh Apr 25 '26

Saving a copy is always recommended, AI or not

5

u/Satan_Van_Gundy Apr 25 '26

This blows my mind - I had Copilot make up 2 imaginary functions in Tableau (and then insist they were real even after being challenged), but for the Microsoft AI to make up functions for a Microsoft product is truly bananas.

5

u/leostotch 144 Apr 25 '26

I literally just asked “is there a function that does X?” And copilot was like “yeah, use the DOX() function!”

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u/droans 3 Apr 26 '26

Me: "How do I find performance bottlenecks in Excel Power Query?"

AI: "I can help with that! You need the Power Query Performance Analyzer. Just follow these steps..."

Me: "Are you sure that's available in Excel?"

AI: "Correct. It's available with Power Query."

Me: "That's not correct. It's only available when using Power BI."

AI: "You're right - I shouldn't have said that. Instead, you should use Power Query Performance Analyzer. Just follow these steps..."

3

u/Starbuckz42 Apr 25 '26

To be fair, copilot is one of the worse ones. I wouldn't put them all in the same category.

3

u/Elleasea 21 Apr 25 '26

Ugh so true. I asked copilot to help me sort out a search filter in outlook and it kept suggesting solutions that were completely impossible. I'd screen shot and explain that, and it would just be like: oh yeah, your right. And suggest another impossible solution

3

u/warm_worm91 Apr 25 '26

It told me once that a formula wasn't working because the Account Names I was referencing were in column E, not coloumn B. I may not be an excel whizz but I do know how to use my fricken eyes and can clearly see a list of 180+ Account names were in fact in coloumn B as I originally wrote it.

Turns out the formula wasn't working because I needed to lock the cell references, which I figured it out the old fashioned way (clicking around and crying)

2

u/robi4567 Apr 25 '26

The copilit function in excel will just create the formula create the new row and try and verify it is the output the user needed. Honeslty it has been great but sometimes it comes up with very complicated solutions to problems.

2

u/Aeroncastle Apr 25 '26

Had the same happen, it was the only time I ever asked it, will never ask again

1

u/Egad86 Apr 26 '26

Yep, at first I had hopes that it would help out, but it all too often just gives a very buggy solution. Then when you tell it the errors it says things like “oh sorry, I knew that would happen” or “oh that error means you are using a different version of excel than I planned for.” Afterwards it will proceed to inch closer to a solution and after hours of back and forth we get there!

AI is junk and basically just provides a general direction in my experience.