AI in Excel: Valuable Assistant or Unpaid Intern?
There are several tools available, but how will they work for you?
Whether you are a seasoned Excel pro or just starting off your adventure with this application, AI can be a valuable assistant. Acting as your worksheet teacher, analyst, builder or janitor, AI can help save time and make your day-to-day work more efficient.
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. While AI can be a great assistant, it can also be, at times, more like an unpaid intern who is just living for the weekend. With all AI usage, it is important to double check its work to ensure accuracy.
Which Tool Do I Choose?
Right now, there is a battle going on in the AI industry with many different companies trying to make it to the top. Remember when we used to have so many options for an internet browser? Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla, AOL, etc. That’s where AI is at right now. Just like internet browsers, I expect a couple of AI tools to make it to the top as the clear winners eventually, but for now, my advice is to match the AI tool to your currently used applications. If you use Microsoft Excel, Copilot (Microsoft’s AI tool) and Claude AI can integrate directly with Excel. If Google Sheets is your go-to, Gemini cooperates well as they are both tools owned by Google. All of these can be used as a side panel directly on your worksheet that can make changes and suggestions for you in real time if you have a higher subscription tier. Using other AI tools or lower subscription tiers will require you to upload your document to the app or browser version and the AI will be more likely to make mistakes.
As with many things in life, you get what you pay for when it comes to AI tools. As a general rule of thumb, the higher-priced plans will provide a better AI assistant that is capable of more and will cause fewer errors.
The Teacher
This is one of the areas where AI can really shine. It is also an area where a free version of AI is very proficient. In this role, AI won’t make any changes to your worksheet for you, but if you’re unfamiliar with Excel or just unsure about a certain feature, ask AI! It will provide step-by-step instructions in great detail on how you can get the job done yourself. You can be very conversational with AI, so if you get stuck or don’t understand an instruction, ask again and it should provide clearer directions to help you every step of the way.
The Analyst
This is another area where AI is very proficient. If you have sets of data you want some insight on quickly, AI should at least be your first destination in the process. With even a simple prompt such as “Please provide five insights on this set of data,” AI will return clear revelations in a matter of seconds. The cleaner your data set, the better the results will be. If your worksheet has a lot of words or your columns and rows aren’t exactly aligned, I recommend doing some clean-up before you try to let AI analyze this data.
The Builder
This role that AI can play has a lot of time-saving potential. It is a more advanced role, so I would reserve this for the higher-priced tiers of AI for now. If you need to build out complex formulas, conditional formatting, tables, charts, etc., AI can be your best friend! However, this may be where you also run into that unpaid intern living for the weekend. Your AI tool can do these accurately, but this is the biggest area where double checking the work is extremely important. As Excel pros know, one small mistake in a formula can easily return an error or inaccurate results. The small errors that AI can make are getting better, but they do still exist. At the time of writing this, if your AI makes more than three mistakes in a row, I recommend building this worksheet out yourself instead of putting all your time into AI. But stay tuned as current predictions for these problems to be widely fixed are approximately 4-12 months!
The Janitor
AI can help save a lot of time in this area as well, but like the builder, its work needs to be thoroughly double checked. The higher-tier plans that integrate directly into Excel work very well here for some basic worksheet clean-up like adjusting column width, deleting duplicates and adding wrapped text to cells. However, this only works well if you have some Excel knowledge. A basic prompt such as “clean this document to make it look better” is not likely to return great results. You will need to be very specific and use Excel terminology to get the results you want, such as “Add a bottom border to row 3 between columns B through E.”
Recommendation
Start using it now! AI is getting better every single day. Start to learn what AI can do. Play with prompts and save the ones that work well in a “Prompt List”. The day where using AI is the undisputed most efficient way to build, manage and clean your worksheets is likely coming in the near future, so the more you learn now, the more prepared you will be when that day arrives.
If you want to chat more about data, Excel and AI, send me an email at ethompson@rmimarketing.com. I would love to talk more about this with you and how it can benefit your business!
– Evan Thompson, Data Manager & Marketing Specialist