At Databricks summit there was a nice presentation [0] by the CEO of V7 labs who showed a demo of their LLM + Spreadsheet product.<p>The kneejerk reaction of “ugh, LLM and spreadsheet?!” is understandable, but I encourage you to watch that demo. It makes clear some obvious potentials of LLMs in spreadsheets. They can basically be an advanced autofill. If you’ve used CoPilot in VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you. This should be achievable in spreadsheets as well.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=0SVilfbn-HY&t=1251" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=0SVilfbn-HY&t=1251</a> (queued to demo at 20:51)
I've found that all the top foundation models already understand spreadsheets very well, as well as all the functions, as well as all the common spreadsheet problems people run into using them. The Internet is chock full spreadsheet support forums and tutorials, and the foundation models have all been trained on this data.<p>With not very much effort, one can explain to an LLM "here is a spreadsheet, formatted as..." which takes about 150 word tokens, and then not much more mental effort in your favorite language to translate an arbitrary spreadsheet into that format, and one gets a very capable LLM interface that can help explain complex arbitrary spreadsheets as well as generate them on request.<p>I've got finance professionals and attorneys using a tool I wrote doing this to help them understand and debug complex spreadsheets given to them by peers and clients.
I love the deep technical discussions on HN, and I'm disappointed to see anything AI related start to just resemble Reddit threads of people with knee jerk reactions to the title.<p>This is interesting, it's about how you can represent spreadsheets to llms.
How will it work?<p>I open an Excel spreadsheet and also the AI Copilot. Then whenever I want to do something with Excel like "Show me which cells have formulas" CoPilot will interact with Excel and issue some command I cannot remember to do that for me?<p>Menus are good but often hard to navigate and find. So the CoPilot can give me a whole new (prompt-based) user-interface to any MS-application? Is that how it works?
I'm now so reliant on ChatGPT for gSheets, that I'd be almost unable to maintain my sheets' absurd formulas without it.<p>It's also really accelerated my knowledge / skills of the specifics of the excel language.<p>Having an LLM being able to directly read/write at the sheet level, instead of just generating formulas for one cell, would be amazing.
The real trick would be for LLMs, which currently do math very poorly, to simply send "math to be done" into a spreadsheet, and retrieve the results... (If anyone is aware of an LLM that's great at math and physics, pls lmk!!)
Spreadsheets can fill the gap between ad-hoc prompting/prompt workbooks and custom software for special business tasks.<p>By using a prompt function like LABS.GENERATIVEAI in Excel you can create solutions that combine calculations, data, and Generative AI. In my experience, transforming data to and from CSV works best for prompting in spreadsheets. Getting data to and from CSV format can be done with other spreadsheet functions.<p>I've created a book and course (<a href="https://mitjamartini.com/resources/ai-engineering/ebooks/hands-on-chatgpt-in-excel/" rel="nofollow">https://mitjamartini.com/resources/ai-engineering/ebooks/han...</a>) that teaches how to do this (both more beginner level). Just working through the examples or the examples provided by Anthropic for Claude for Sheets should be enough to get going.
Goodness, I've been making a joke that AI companies are going to spend 500 billion dollars to make spreadsheet generators since 2023, and now it's becoming real. Gemini has a limited form of this too.
Ah yes, Excel, the piece of software that already famously mangles data, is now going to be glued to software that also famously mangles data.<p>Honestly, though, I kind of kid - I <i>love</i> spreadsheets, and if this <i>actually works</i>, it could be interesting. God help whoever needs to troubleshoot the hallucinated results - it's already hard enough to figure out what byzantine knotwork someone created using existing Excel functions, but now we'll have to also guess and second-guess layers of prompts that were used to either generate those same functions, or just generate output that got mulched through some AI black-box.
Uhh, this is a paper about how to compress spreadsheet data to fit inside an LLM’s token limits, including such novel approaches as ignoring exact values of numbers, meaning of data types, and any context outside of a detected table of values.<p>The paper doesn’t speak at all to actual uses of this approach, but that doesn’t stop the article writer from assuming this is probably a big step towards automated tools that analyze spreadsheet data for non-numerically inclined users.<p>This is not that.
I am calmly waiting for the SEC to rip them a new hole the size of Manhattan when hallucinated spreadsheets inevitably make their way into listed companies' reports.