What? That’s not what the article says.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
ITT: people who didn’t read the article.
Excel is still doing the calculations, not the AI. The AI is helping to write functions. You can easily spot check a couple examples then apply that same formula down the column. I don’t really see the issue.
Of all the things to shove AI into, the first thing that came to my mind years back was Excel. It’s handy when I’m presented a spreadsheet of data at work and I just want to do something like “write a function to extract just the number from a column containing data formatted like LPF_PHASE_OF_CARE [PAF 304001]” because I just want to copy paste all the numbers somewhere. It’s trivial to verify it works correctly, I can examine the formula, and I don’t have to wade through numerous shitty Excel tutorial websites to try and teach myself something I’ll use once or twice a year.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 2 days ago
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well, the article is covering the disclaimer, which is vague enough to mean pretty much whatever.
I can buy that he is taking it to the level of if it can’t directly be used for the stuff in the disclaimer, well, what could it be used for then? Crafting formulas seems to be a possibility, especially since the spreadsheet formula language is kind of esoteric and clumsy to read and write. It ‘should’ be up an LLM alley, a relatively limited grammar that’s kind of a pain for a human to work with, but easy enough to get right in theory for an LLM. LLM is sometimes useful for script/programming but the vocabulary and complexity can easily get away from it, but excel formula are less likely to have programming level complexity or arbitrarily many methods to invoke. You of course have to eyeball the formula to see if it looks right, and if it does screw up the cell parameters, that might be a hard thing to catch by eyeballing for most people.
Windex007@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Excel is still doing the calculations, not the AI. The AI is helping to write functions.
This distinction is immaterial. This is like a big child grabbing a smaller child’s hand and slapping them with their own hand saying “quit hitting yourself”. It’s like trying to get out of a speeding ticket by saying all you did was push the accelerator… Truely it was the fuel injectors forcing the vehicle to an illegal speed.
Just because you’ve adjusted the abstraction layer at which you’ve ceded deterministic outcomes, doesn’t mean AI isn’t doing it.
You can easily spot check a couple examples then apply that same formula down the column.
This may be appropriate in some scenarios, specifically:
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When accuracy isn’t important
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When you will never need to justify what is being done to anyone (including yourself)
This, however, covers a decidedly small portion of professional work done using Excel.
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4am@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
If it didn’t use 100 gallons of freshwater and like 600kW of definitely-non-renewable-sourced electricity then ML trained to do excel at Excel would be most welcome.
Does it run locally?
ch00f@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Honestly, if they just made it easier to craft a formula (like, I dunno multiple lines, some kind of better color coding of matched parentheses, etc), that’d go a lot farther.
4am@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
You can already do multiple lines. Drag the divider between the entry box and the grid down to make it larger, and use Alt-Enter to make a new line in a formula. Been there since at least 2009. You’re welcome.
whats_a_lemmy@midwest.social 2 days ago
Can’t you already use newlines and whitespace in Excel formulas?