Submitted 1 day ago by corbin@infosec.pub to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.spacebar.news/excel-ai-twenty-percent-of-the-time-it-works-every-time/
Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It’s solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There’s a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can’t remember how it goes.
Just look what they’re doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM… Kill all your main characters.
Forget Xbox, look at how they’re treating Windows lately.
yep. it’s the one tool that is incredibly versatile in the workplace and for which I do not have a replacement
are there better tools? quite often. would those tools be able to be used by anybody opening the files you are sharing with them? nope. and keeping things in the same format means it’s very easy to move data across files and link things up.
forms, trackers, calculations, data logging, all easy to reference/transfer to one another and I can expect anybody on my team to be able to work with files I send them without having to teach them how to use a different program
And you dare not risk your financial data when plotting a migration! Been there, done that, no one ever suggested moving from Excel to another product.
How is adding new features that you don’t have to use but which can be insanely powerful “fucking with it”?
Some computer scientists really went “we made a computer that is programmed in a different way and is sometimes correct” and these idiot corpos went “wow put it in everything”
Trillions of dollars to develop a calculator that’s wrong sometimes.
AI Agents having access to the functionality of Excel means that they won’t be wrong with the actual calculations though, since it doesn’t do 5x10 in the LLM but instead uses excels built in functions to do it.
AI and excel are a match made in heaven tbh. Same with AI and databases.
I mean, most calculators are wrong quite often
I’ve never seen a calculator being wrong, and I’m genuinely curious what you’re talking about.
No, the user is wrong quite often, the calculator gives the answer to the question asked, not the answer to the question the user wanted to ask.
Garbage in, garbage out.
this one is just wrongerer
Excel is such an incredible piece of shit. There’s many reasons to hate it for me, but what i hate the most is not being able to do relationships in any meaningful way. So often i need to have one to many relationships and this garbage makes it impossible. Data consistency? Nope. Opening a csv? Fuck you! Why the fuck are there online tools that are better at this shit? You had 40 years ffs. No amount of AI is going to fix this turd. God I hate Excel.
There’s a ton of reasons to hate Excel, I’m sure, but I don’t think lack of support for relational data is a reasonable one. There’s tools for that job, but Excel isn’t trying to be one of them.
Just because it doesn’t offer features a database has doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to use it as one
I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades
I get that. But it’s a case that’s just so incredibly common. Tagging/categorization. We end up with multiple columns like ‘cat 1’, ‘cat 2’, etc. Or doing pivot tables. I guess to me there’s pretty much always something that can do the job better, but the reality is that in the corporate setting I operate in everybody uses Excel.
With power query, Excel can perform more database-like functions, I use it all the time! It comes with it’s own quirks however
Everyone else who’s anti-AI:
- What is that smell? It smells like a used diaper filled with Indian food!
- What is that?! It smells like a turd covered in burnt hair!
- It smells like Bigfoot’s dick!
ITT: people who haven’t seen the movie, I guess.
0% of the time it works because I shut that shit off the first minute I saw it
$20 of the time
Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why ‘copilot in excel’ (not agent mode) wasn’t designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn’t designed for it.
54% isn’t really low when people only get 72%.
Damn thats high!/s
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
It’s about time all those math types learned to relax a bit. These numbers in these spreadsheets don’t need to be exact all the time. It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is. Error bars are there for a reason people!
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Vibe accounting
rainwall@piefed.social 23 hours ago
Microsoft literally calls the feature “vibe working.” Youre not far off the actual name.
They aren’t even pretending to care anymore.
frongt@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I mean, it’s on brand with everything else these days: newsweek.com/how-much-trump-worth-depends-how-he-…
xkbx@startrek.website 1 day ago
“Please calculate the totals to reflect a favourable results”
chunes@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sounds like what accountants do already
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
It’s all about whether your accounts give a vibe of truthiness. Auditors need to chill.
JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It’s just the vibe of the… thing