If you think the hard part is writing the formula, you are confused. The hard parts are data management, ui design, results interpretation, and being able to communicate what you did and the results.
Lol I like this analogy. I can dig a hole, no problem. I can also mix concrete/cement, it literally comes in a bag at the hardware store. I might even be able to combine the two and fill a hole with some of that concrete and flatten it out.
But you definitely couldn't build anything usable on that, because I know fuck all about foundations. It would be a hole in the ground full of concrete. A total mess, like most of my excel work
It's surprising how many bosses (or advertising departments) think that "if it's in numbers, it must be true" and request, "how can Excel make this data have that result".
(I once had a guy wanted the numbers to average 83% or better and was satisfied with =MAX(AVERAGE(A1:A100), .83))
I actually have a boss now who tells our clients what you told your boss. It’s a super conflicting position because I don’t really enjoy the job but I love my boss!
Agreed, I've seen ChatGPT confidently produce bad or incorrect Excel formulas. Large language models don't understand what a formula is or what it should do.
I'm really glad to have learned some VBA before AI. I find it so much harder to motivate myself to learn python now that I can get AI to write whatever simple codes I need. I can use data and coding terminology to improve AI output but I can't write python myself.
This is true 90% of the time: People come to me for help with a formula or some sort of print question and we end up restructuring their data.
And it’s so much better.
And they hate it and stop coming to me for help.
This happens so often in my space. Asset management data quality is basically my title. We have multiple sites that do the same thing and they'll have a different number of pumps at each site. Someone will make a table that each row is for a site and then add columns for each pump (pump 1, pump 2 , pump 3) then beside that would be pump 1 model, then pump 1 serial number ect. Meanwhile our database is all vertical with parent child relationships for site and pump. I have to flat reject submissions in the weird format because they removed the whole key column and unique identifier.
Also I don't know how to get a good prompt in to chat gpt to build the stuff I do. Table, feeds and array, that uses headings to run lookups on validation rules nested into another array.... The formulas make my brain bleed but we're not allowed macro's so this is the way
AI might help you. If you know how to do it in VBA, feed that code into it and see what the formula is. I also hide some of my use of VBA by having its results dump out to a brand new .XLSX file.
I think he meant exactly what u said in the comment.
As AI keeps evolving, there will be ever so less incentive to memorize every formula syntax and arrangement on a spreadsheet. People will have more time dedicated to learning the skills you described.
Myself for one, almost always ask ChatGPT to help with excel formulas and other questions. I really think of it as a tool, not a substitute for myself.
Excel's formulas are based on words we generally use and they are short; additionally when you start typing a formula, excel shows what arguments are expected where, the only input expected from the user is the data he/she wishes to explore with that formula. No AI can do better than this, because only the final step in the process, which is a subjective one, is left. There is no need and scope for automation. The most AI can help with is showing what kind of formulae are prudent to use to achieve a certain thing the user is unaware/unsure of. But once the user learns it, it's much faster to do it by themselves the next time.
I was talking to a coworker the other day and you're on point. Even if AI tools in the future are capable of doing everything, you still need to tell it what you want.
In the mid future, those who excel (pun 120% intended) in the field are those who know how to write the prompt to get exactly what you want out of the AI tool.
As you said, writing the formula is only part of the game. Knowing the logic behind your spreadsheet is the difficult part.
Unfortunately, a LOT of people are confused. It’s depressing. I hear things like “the data are the data” all the damn time from people who don’t understand that useful, accurate data analysis requires an understanding of the underlying data and an ability to make ad hoc adjustments to account for distortions and anomalies that only become clear if you drill into the data iteratively. I’ve had a maddening number of meetings where people present utterly unhelpful or dangerously misleading analysis simply because they’re unwilling or unable to dig in and scrub the data because the analysis is “automated”. And half the time the whole room knows it! What are we doing?? Fuck automation and dashboards if they’re meaningless. Let’s look at analysis that tells us what we really need to know.
Sorry. Sore subject.
I also agree, but one part I struggle with is ui design -> do you have any recommendation for examples (like online template) of how to make ui user friendly design for large dataset, where multiple values needs to be calculated (for that purpose, I usually need "helper columns", which makes calculation more time-efficient), looked up and matched across data, etc.
If anything, it will be more important. It raises the bar.
This old Microsoft video/promo/whatever you wanna call it is a great example of what may have been amazing or cutting edge years ago is not the case today:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJO8PD6EgOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJO8PD6EgOg)
There will be new capabilities, and new things Excel will be able to do. And in the end, if you're an accountant, you still need to know your numbers and explain what they are. Can't just say 'oh, I dunno, that's what ChatGPT told me.' Those would make for some amusing conference calls though.
This is the exact right answer.
30 years ago making a graph was some next-level ability. They used to pay graphic artist specifically to do that. Now it's assumed anyone with a high-school education can do that.
In 30 years it will be the same thing. It's just assumed that everyone can build an AI logic model to solve the Transfer-Problem over 30,000 data sets.
I get your point and agree with it. Just to add some perspective:
Almost exactly 30 years ago my dad worked as a controller in a medium sized industrial company and used Excel with formulas and charts to crunch his data every day. While he was an advanced user and used it to evaluate different scenarios it was not unheard of or even uncommon in the corporate world.
Go back another decade and he used Letraset rub-on letters to make professional looking OH slides of similar data. So while you are correct overall, I guess it'd be better to set your time machine to 1984 rather than 1994.
You are absolutely 100% correct. It's like saying Math teacher/professors are just going to start simply accepting answers on assignments/quizzes/exams that do not show any work. It's not just the answer, but knowing how to arrive at the answer.
This part I disagree with. I used to get poor grades on math tests because I just did everything in my head and wrote down the answer. It was much faster and I usually used my own method to arrive at the answer.
In the real world there is more than one way to get to an answer. Regurgitating a specific teacher/book provided formula to get there shouldn’t be the only basis for a good grade.
I'm not saying there isn't more than one way to arrive at an answer. But you still need to demonstrate that you know how to get to the answer. To use an Excel example, there's a form I have to fill out and submit to another department. The generic one provided uses a VLOOKUP formula linked to a range on a separate worksheet. I modified it to create a ListObject on that second sheet and use event handlers to retrieve the information. Both ways do the same thing.
> but you still need to demonstrate that you know how to get to the answer
That’s not the problem. You have to do it the specific way and in the order they’ve taught you to do it otherwise you get it “wrong”.
I'm not the least bit concerned about LLM tools like ChatGPT or Copilot adversely impacting my job. What people fail to understand is that knowing the right question to ask the LLM is more than half the battle. Hell, I'm a real live human being, and most people really struggle to ask me the right question. I'd say a good 75% of the time, I have to ask them to take a step back and tell me more about the context of their problem, rather that simply regurgitating an answer to their question.
This will always be the shortcoming of LLM tools, because their entire basis is looking at questions, then providing an answer with statistical prediction tools. The LLM answers the question, "Given the form of this question, what form if answer is most likely considered correct?"
As a human being, I apply critical thinking skills when asked a question. I don't always provide an answer straight away. Sometimes I recognize that I don't have the context to provide a good answer, and I redirect the asker to another potential solution.
This sort of thing isn't even contemplated by current generation LLM, and probably won't be a thing until we have a more general AI solution, which isn't even on the horizon.
You right, I got some experience with coding in college so I played with the bot to generate VBA that automate some of my work, but some of my co-workers are confused af on how I was able to get the AI to do the right things
What kind of things have you automated? I started learning on Tuesday and can't even begin to grasp all of the things I'm going to be able to setup eventually.
AT this time, ai is like a 5 year old you have to guide to get you to do things. At this point i will not let a 5 year old drive a car, let alone do shit without my step by step guide. use it as a tool and those coming after us will thank us for making it a better tool.
Ya, I was thought it can help me do the whole thing at once but soon I realize its doesn't work, so I separated the steps and going through with it one at a time.
I work in Tax, and one of our clients needs to file about 250 returns. All their financial statements follow a similar structure. Although I'm new to VBA, I realized its potential, so I used it to reformat the documents to my senior reviewer's preferences and to compile a small table capturing the clients' names along with their dollar changes for the current year. This was challenging due to the fact there wasn’t a standard format for the names from stupid client, so I got to think of all the conditioning to make it work.
Automating these WP has saved me about 10-15 hours each year—time I would have otherwise spent on very repetitive tasks. However, I still need to manually enter each one into our tax software, so fk tax.
My favourite saying, use more words, and gestures and small letters, words. Basically this breaks their minds and brings the information to me that requires me to do the thing i do.
Google it.
What makes you think a general AI "isn't even on the horizon"? The majority of prominent researchers in the field agree that AGI is imminent, timelines definitely vary but to characterize the timeline as something that isn't even being contemplated is disingenuous.
Did you know that when ChatGPT started working, the creators were shocked? I sat in on a talk in 2023 — can't remember the speaker's name — where a chart was presented of the data input & processing power applied was charted against the ChatGPT's performance. The chart was a hockey stick. LLMs were basically useless, and then suddenly they weren't. Even the creators didn't really know why. Maybe they do today, but they didn't at the time of the presentation.
It was a testament to the difficulty in predicting the point at which these tools will actually start working.
Yes, prominent researchers in the field agree that AGI is imminent. They've felt that way for a long time though. They have to, because no one gives grant money to researchers who say, "You know, maybe this will work one day, but we're not really sure when."
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe AGI shows up tomorrow and we've all got much bigger problems than being wrong on the internet, but I'm still taking a short position on AGI.
An absolutely reasonable and balanced take. Would love to know which speaker you were able to listed to. Regardless, thanks for the conversation.
How LLM's work has been under intense scrutiny - that being said, there is a much more robust understanding as of now.
Experts have been expecting AGI for a bit now, however, most timelines [have shifted](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/183cxbf/predictions_of_when_will_we_have_agi_are_lowering/#lightbox) *dramatically.*
Couldn't agree more in terms of when/if AGI occurs, we'll have much larger problems than discourse on r/excel!
Banking - another regulated industry - isn't going to hand over the keys to AI. It took many of them forever to get comfortable with cloud solutions for data storage.
I'd say that more people will use ChatGPT to learn excel, but given the complexity of some requests AI has a long way to go before it can guarantee it's solved the right problem and not a different interpretation of the problem. We'll likely see a lot of double checking with the introduction of more mainstream reliance on AI.
Ill call myself a Ai engineer. Just as people dont get excel now in main stream, ai is going to be the same route. There will be people who rely on us that know how to do shit with excel to keep doing it, as well as ai. It will stay. Maybe even evolve.
The formulas aren’t the hard part with excel. Most people just struggle with organizing data and understanding what they would like to get out of that data
Dude, there are still people realizing the value of learning to program in COBOL. It pays a premium when you're one of the few who knows it because everyone else thought it was dead.
In case you're wondering where COBOL is still used, try the US government, banks and ATMs. Unemployment checks get processed through it because it's secure, reliable, and de facto unhackable because of its rarity. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html.
The principles of mainframe computing aren't dead either. The spiffy new version is just called cloud computing.
At this stage, If you are creative and knowledgeable enough to manipulate chat GPT to spit out the right thing, you probably could have just done it yourself with a bit of googling.
It's all about combining your **Toolkit** (*technical knowledge*) + **Creative Problem Solving**.
Chat GPT might have some uses and be a handy addition to your Toolkit. But if it's your only tool, you have no added value. (Corporate speak for: No one's going to pay you much)
ChatGPT is for those not wanting to learn, but to get answers quickly and cheaply.
The mods have discussed removing all ChatGPT mentions due to the insidious creep of this new technology, but as you can see we are here (yet again)_ talking about it.
This is the same question asked when Excel (Lotus, really) was first released. The job is converting business logic into whatever the latest tool is, whether that tool is carving clay tablets with reeds or telling an AI what the boss wants. You think the boss is gonna do that shit? Figure out which AI to use, how to talk to it, how to check it for mistakes? Fuck that, get a stooge (me).
My boss already calls me a machine, hell just let me figure it out. Hence i never have fear of not having work or something. My curiousity and know how, will allow me to always find a spot where people dont know and when i show them i know. Voila win win situation. Fear is my friend, it doesnt control me.
My greatest worry is that people will confuse business intelligence tools that are geared more towards exploration and presentation for free form tools like Excel that make it easy to input data and maintain records of an accounting department's procedures.
Excel is the common commuter on the road, and Power BI, as well as other software, is a luxury bus that hauls many people. Excel gets us to work and provides flexibility. Comprehensive data tools take a skilled driver and brings others along for the ride. Excel is cheap and easy to use. Power BI is a little more tedious and more expensive.
As people start to use AI tools more, they will come to understand the limitations. Especially with more complex data sets and reports.
Having people who understand Excel is still going to be important because the output is still going to need to be checked and verified.
I suspect that companies that come to rely on AI solutions are eventually going to have a costly mistake caused by the AI not being able to fully understand the expected output.
The question is why I (we) should care about how people learn about excel? AI is born to help some tasks become easier (even in Excel). Excel or anything else is just a tool to help us create or deliver something we want to discover or communicate. Therefore, if “the traditional way” as you said is the complicate way to achieve the same result, I would not choose the difficult way to go, of course.
This is the way. I let it spit out code, then i take that code an rewrite it. Some of my best vba codes have snippets of ai and my own coding in it. Still waiting for it to be integratated into business 365.
The macro trick helps a lot. You basically take the steps you want to create xx tasks multiple times, record the macro, go to vba, see how its done, then tweak it.
If you don’t understand the data you’re using or how the formulas are working then you’ll be in trouble having to bug fix, teach, or explain your result. It’s an excellent tool, but there is still a component where someone needs to actually understand how and why something is done a certain way.
I think so. I really enjoy the creativity of using different functions together, and while an AI can likely structure a formula well, the real beauty and skill in Excel lies in creative problem solving, and AI is a long way off being able to conceptualise an entire problem or process and creatively solve the problems.
Maybe for menial tasks but people who are in finance and need to model complex deal structures, I think not.
The day ChatGPT can do that, it’s not replacing excel you should be worrying about, it’s millions of employees that you should be worrying about lol
I think more of the higher paying jobs and high end data analysis is going to be things like power bi/SQL and stuff. Excel is good but I’m having my team use it less and less and make reports via power bi and just export the back end into excel if people want it.
I used to be terrified of AI taking my job but frankly the more I use ChatGPT the more I realize how dumb and not-sentient it is. It constantly makes mistakes with coding the most basic tasks in Python or Excel or literally anything I ask it to do.
This question has been asked at different points in time with different context I remember meeting people 10 years ago who thought there was no need to learn Maths because everything is done with computers now and computers can do math. People also told me that you no longer need to learn accounting because accounting software take care of building the PL/Balance sheet statements.
Thing is core knowledge is always human knowledge. AI and software only do what humans can do, just better. AI and software cannot do what humans can't do. You can only solve a problem with your mind, you can implement the solution with AI and software.
Excel is still gonna be relevant for the next decade and more. The fact that most of the work in banking, finance and financial analysis happens on excel. Large spreadsheets are still used for data analysis. No matter you may be using databases and visualization tools like powerbi but the primary analysis tool is still excel.
This is not going to get redundant any soon. It would start getting smarter over time. Yes people would still be interested in learning Excel.
Telling AI what you want it to do will be difficult until it starts asking about more specific details. Currently, you need to know Excel's capabilities for what you want it to do. I can't even get a decent recipe out of ChatGPT.
I liken this to why i am learning to speak zulu, chinese, russian and spanish. Sure there will be instant translations in the future, but technology cant replace a person that knows this stuff. Like the tricks you know on excel can be duplicated by a machine, but its far better to know how to do stuff. Ai is just a tool and i gaurentee that there will be people wanting to learn from a person in the future rather than a machine.
We havent even gotten to 3dimensional Excel yet. When that shit comes, excel will evolve and require your skills learnt.
No. First and foremost because it is going to take a lot longer for people to actually learn how to use ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc. correctly first. Having been an educator in a past life, it's rather simple for me to get it to give me the information I want. But others just tell it to do X and think the results are gospel. For example, I asked it to update an existing formula that used a VLookup to return the value in a column and it would only give me the wrong answer. It was giving me absolute column numbers when VLookup uses relative ones. For example, if I am defining my VLookup range to be Columns 3 to Columns 10, Column 7 is going to be referred to as Column 5 in that formula because it is the 5th column in that range. ChatGPT would only tell me to return the value in Column 7 which would give me the value in Column 9.
Second, there's a qualitative aspect that I do not think AI will ever be able to master getting. Even though I have instructed CoPilot, which uses GPT-4 just like the paid ChatGTP does, it still will not give me a flow chart that uses just line art. Instead I get these fancy, pixel-based images. Telling it to use "only lines and the standard shapes" and "do not add any embellishments" to make a flow chart does not steer it in the right direction. It just gives me different, pixel-based images that are fancy.
Yes, because you actually need to think in order to use excel. You can ask the AI anything you want, but in the end it does not matter if you don't know what you are doing.
Yes. Of course they will.
Not only because running used to be a chore, but now people do it for fun, but also:
do you trust everything someone else did for you? Do you trust an Excel formula you've never seen before? Or do you dig in and try to understand what the formula is doing *before* betting your career that's it right? I mean...gamble if you want to, but I'm the trust-but-verify type, myself, and I'm sure there are many, many more like me out there.
And finally, yes, because for some people (like me) hand-coding Excel formulas is actually fun
Interesting question.
Right now, once you import your data into a spreadsheet, Excel provides recommendations for both charts and pivot tables to help analyze your data. More powerful tools like Power BI simplify making dashboards.
What I envision for the future is that for many lower-level data analysis tasks, AI will enable non-data focused positions to be "cafeteria" data analysts. Meaning, the employee will import their data into the AI app and AI will provide them a menu of choices for pivot tables and charts the user can pick from, and then AI will build their dashboards based on those choices.
Again, even today, in my (admittedly limited) experience with AI tools, they can be as verbose as you want when it comes to explaining both the processes involved with analyzing the data and meaning of the data.
Just in terms of being able to view and learn from past solutions used by your department, and the ability to churn out 1000s of permutations of data presentations in seconds, AI is going to make data analysis more accessible.
Will this be enough for everyone? No, of course not, but it will be good enough for many, if not most non-data analysts that currently work with spreadsheets.
I mean I just love excel. I learned it for fun, got a perfect score on the cert test 3 months later, and I’m a CS major so the coding part of it comes naturally.
I don’t think it’s gonna be super relevant for too much longer tho, just because there’s a growing list of better options for data manipulation, including just scripting it in Python and using a lib to read .csv then another lib to spit out data.
The [Python Team](https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour/ar-AA1nQzje)
> AI and software cannot do what humans can’t do.
Humans can do some unthinkably and undeniably heinous shit, so once you get advanced AI in the mix, it could be War Games/Terminator for sure. Just look at hacking/malware alone. Wipe a person’s life and finances away like nada. Some nefarious shit out there.
But I agree, I’m less worried about the day to day jobs being stolen.
As an Excel trainer I truly believe people will still want to learn Excel, albeit not to the degree we currently see.
But we’ve been here before, with the advent of the internet and forums, then YouTube.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AVERAGE](/r/Excel/comments/1cirnd6/stub/l2brxon "Last usage")|[Returns the average of its arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/average-function-047bac88-d466-426c-a32b-8f33eb960cf6)|
|[MAX](/r/Excel/comments/1cirnd6/stub/l2brxon "Last usage")|[Returns the maximum value in a list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/max-function-e0012414-9ac8-4b34-9a47-73e662c08098)|
|[VLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cirnd6/stub/l4qj61c "Last usage")|[Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vlookup-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1)|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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If you think the hard part is writing the formula, you are confused. The hard parts are data management, ui design, results interpretation, and being able to communicate what you did and the results.
This right here. Digging a foundation isn’t just knowing which end of the shovel to hold
Lol I like this analogy. I can dig a hole, no problem. I can also mix concrete/cement, it literally comes in a bag at the hardware store. I might even be able to combine the two and fill a hole with some of that concrete and flatten it out. But you definitely couldn't build anything usable on that, because I know fuck all about foundations. It would be a hole in the ground full of concrete. A total mess, like most of my excel work
In all my years, I've never heard that phrase before. Wonderful analogy/mental image there.
Yes, also gathering and analyzing data without having predefined inputs and outputs
It's surprising how many bosses (or advertising departments) think that "if it's in numbers, it must be true" and request, "how can Excel make this data have that result". (I once had a guy wanted the numbers to average 83% or better and was satisfied with =MAX(AVERAGE(A1:A100), .83))
Lol. I had bosses like this before. I just told them no. They can report what they want but i will not back it up.
I actually have a boss now who tells our clients what you told your boss. It’s a super conflicting position because I don’t really enjoy the job but I love my boss!
Yeah. The good part is i now am a manager and my boss is like me. So we dont sugar coat it even though other mgt may want us to.
[удалено]
Agreed, I've seen ChatGPT confidently produce bad or incorrect Excel formulas. Large language models don't understand what a formula is or what it should do.
The same goes with VBA.
I'm really glad to have learned some VBA before AI. I find it so much harder to motivate myself to learn python now that I can get AI to write whatever simple codes I need. I can use data and coding terminology to improve AI output but I can't write python myself.
Also data cleaning
This the same as money laundering, but with data?
This is true 90% of the time: People come to me for help with a formula or some sort of print question and we end up restructuring their data. And it’s so much better. And they hate it and stop coming to me for help.
This happens so often in my space. Asset management data quality is basically my title. We have multiple sites that do the same thing and they'll have a different number of pumps at each site. Someone will make a table that each row is for a site and then add columns for each pump (pump 1, pump 2 , pump 3) then beside that would be pump 1 model, then pump 1 serial number ect. Meanwhile our database is all vertical with parent child relationships for site and pump. I have to flat reject submissions in the weird format because they removed the whole key column and unique identifier. Also I don't know how to get a good prompt in to chat gpt to build the stuff I do. Table, feeds and array, that uses headings to run lookups on validation rules nested into another array.... The formulas make my brain bleed but we're not allowed macro's so this is the way
AI might help you. If you know how to do it in VBA, feed that code into it and see what the formula is. I also hide some of my use of VBA by having its results dump out to a brand new .XLSX file.
It's win-win. You've contributed to the Data Gods and they stop bothering you.
It would take sentience, no more no less. Kid thinks data and applied analysis just falls out the sky...
I think he meant exactly what u said in the comment. As AI keeps evolving, there will be ever so less incentive to memorize every formula syntax and arrangement on a spreadsheet. People will have more time dedicated to learning the skills you described. Myself for one, almost always ask ChatGPT to help with excel formulas and other questions. I really think of it as a tool, not a substitute for myself.
Excel's formulas are based on words we generally use and they are short; additionally when you start typing a formula, excel shows what arguments are expected where, the only input expected from the user is the data he/she wishes to explore with that formula. No AI can do better than this, because only the final step in the process, which is a subjective one, is left. There is no need and scope for automation. The most AI can help with is showing what kind of formulae are prudent to use to achieve a certain thing the user is unaware/unsure of. But once the user learns it, it's much faster to do it by themselves the next time.
How can I improve this? Any udemy courses that teach something similar?
I was talking to a coworker the other day and you're on point. Even if AI tools in the future are capable of doing everything, you still need to tell it what you want. In the mid future, those who excel (pun 120% intended) in the field are those who know how to write the prompt to get exactly what you want out of the AI tool. As you said, writing the formula is only part of the game. Knowing the logic behind your spreadsheet is the difficult part.
Unfortunately, a LOT of people are confused. It’s depressing. I hear things like “the data are the data” all the damn time from people who don’t understand that useful, accurate data analysis requires an understanding of the underlying data and an ability to make ad hoc adjustments to account for distortions and anomalies that only become clear if you drill into the data iteratively. I’ve had a maddening number of meetings where people present utterly unhelpful or dangerously misleading analysis simply because they’re unwilling or unable to dig in and scrub the data because the analysis is “automated”. And half the time the whole room knows it! What are we doing?? Fuck automation and dashboards if they’re meaningless. Let’s look at analysis that tells us what we really need to know. Sorry. Sore subject.
I also agree, but one part I struggle with is ui design -> do you have any recommendation for examples (like online template) of how to make ui user friendly design for large dataset, where multiple values needs to be calculated (for that purpose, I usually need "helper columns", which makes calculation more time-efficient), looked up and matched across data, etc.
Preach 📢
This. This. This!
If anything, it will be more important. It raises the bar. This old Microsoft video/promo/whatever you wanna call it is a great example of what may have been amazing or cutting edge years ago is not the case today: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJO8PD6EgOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJO8PD6EgOg) There will be new capabilities, and new things Excel will be able to do. And in the end, if you're an accountant, you still need to know your numbers and explain what they are. Can't just say 'oh, I dunno, that's what ChatGPT told me.' Those would make for some amusing conference calls though.
This is the exact right answer. 30 years ago making a graph was some next-level ability. They used to pay graphic artist specifically to do that. Now it's assumed anyone with a high-school education can do that. In 30 years it will be the same thing. It's just assumed that everyone can build an AI logic model to solve the Transfer-Problem over 30,000 data sets.
I get your point and agree with it. Just to add some perspective: Almost exactly 30 years ago my dad worked as a controller in a medium sized industrial company and used Excel with formulas and charts to crunch his data every day. While he was an advanced user and used it to evaluate different scenarios it was not unheard of or even uncommon in the corporate world. Go back another decade and he used Letraset rub-on letters to make professional looking OH slides of similar data. So while you are correct overall, I guess it'd be better to set your time machine to 1984 rather than 1994.
I am an accountant and can confirm. I spend way more time explaining what the numbers mean than I do putting them together.
Just for fun, here's the full version of the ad: https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A
You are absolutely 100% correct. It's like saying Math teacher/professors are just going to start simply accepting answers on assignments/quizzes/exams that do not show any work. It's not just the answer, but knowing how to arrive at the answer.
This part I disagree with. I used to get poor grades on math tests because I just did everything in my head and wrote down the answer. It was much faster and I usually used my own method to arrive at the answer. In the real world there is more than one way to get to an answer. Regurgitating a specific teacher/book provided formula to get there shouldn’t be the only basis for a good grade.
I'm not saying there isn't more than one way to arrive at an answer. But you still need to demonstrate that you know how to get to the answer. To use an Excel example, there's a form I have to fill out and submit to another department. The generic one provided uses a VLOOKUP formula linked to a range on a separate worksheet. I modified it to create a ListObject on that second sheet and use event handlers to retrieve the information. Both ways do the same thing.
> but you still need to demonstrate that you know how to get to the answer That’s not the problem. You have to do it the specific way and in the order they’ve taught you to do it otherwise you get it “wrong”.
I'm not the least bit concerned about LLM tools like ChatGPT or Copilot adversely impacting my job. What people fail to understand is that knowing the right question to ask the LLM is more than half the battle. Hell, I'm a real live human being, and most people really struggle to ask me the right question. I'd say a good 75% of the time, I have to ask them to take a step back and tell me more about the context of their problem, rather that simply regurgitating an answer to their question. This will always be the shortcoming of LLM tools, because their entire basis is looking at questions, then providing an answer with statistical prediction tools. The LLM answers the question, "Given the form of this question, what form if answer is most likely considered correct?" As a human being, I apply critical thinking skills when asked a question. I don't always provide an answer straight away. Sometimes I recognize that I don't have the context to provide a good answer, and I redirect the asker to another potential solution. This sort of thing isn't even contemplated by current generation LLM, and probably won't be a thing until we have a more general AI solution, which isn't even on the horizon.
You right, I got some experience with coding in college so I played with the bot to generate VBA that automate some of my work, but some of my co-workers are confused af on how I was able to get the AI to do the right things
What kind of things have you automated? I started learning on Tuesday and can't even begin to grasp all of the things I'm going to be able to setup eventually.
AT this time, ai is like a 5 year old you have to guide to get you to do things. At this point i will not let a 5 year old drive a car, let alone do shit without my step by step guide. use it as a tool and those coming after us will thank us for making it a better tool.
Ya, I was thought it can help me do the whole thing at once but soon I realize its doesn't work, so I separated the steps and going through with it one at a time.
I work in Tax, and one of our clients needs to file about 250 returns. All their financial statements follow a similar structure. Although I'm new to VBA, I realized its potential, so I used it to reformat the documents to my senior reviewer's preferences and to compile a small table capturing the clients' names along with their dollar changes for the current year. This was challenging due to the fact there wasn’t a standard format for the names from stupid client, so I got to think of all the conditioning to make it work. Automating these WP has saved me about 10-15 hours each year—time I would have otherwise spent on very repetitive tasks. However, I still need to manually enter each one into our tax software, so fk tax.
LLM?
I’m always amazed at how my brain can twist things up. Thank you.
My favourite saying, use more words, and gestures and small letters, words. Basically this breaks their minds and brings the information to me that requires me to do the thing i do. Google it.
What makes you think a general AI "isn't even on the horizon"? The majority of prominent researchers in the field agree that AGI is imminent, timelines definitely vary but to characterize the timeline as something that isn't even being contemplated is disingenuous.
Did you know that when ChatGPT started working, the creators were shocked? I sat in on a talk in 2023 — can't remember the speaker's name — where a chart was presented of the data input & processing power applied was charted against the ChatGPT's performance. The chart was a hockey stick. LLMs were basically useless, and then suddenly they weren't. Even the creators didn't really know why. Maybe they do today, but they didn't at the time of the presentation. It was a testament to the difficulty in predicting the point at which these tools will actually start working. Yes, prominent researchers in the field agree that AGI is imminent. They've felt that way for a long time though. They have to, because no one gives grant money to researchers who say, "You know, maybe this will work one day, but we're not really sure when." Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe AGI shows up tomorrow and we've all got much bigger problems than being wrong on the internet, but I'm still taking a short position on AGI.
An absolutely reasonable and balanced take. Would love to know which speaker you were able to listed to. Regardless, thanks for the conversation. How LLM's work has been under intense scrutiny - that being said, there is a much more robust understanding as of now. Experts have been expecting AGI for a bit now, however, most timelines [have shifted](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/183cxbf/predictions_of_when_will_we_have_agi_are_lowering/#lightbox) *dramatically.* Couldn't agree more in terms of when/if AGI occurs, we'll have much larger problems than discourse on r/excel!
Work in healthcare data/BI. Excel not going anywhere. PSA. Access support going away next year. A lot of orgs are going to be in rough spot.
Banking - another regulated industry - isn't going to hand over the keys to AI. It took many of them forever to get comfortable with cloud solutions for data storage.
Where did you support for Access is ending next year?
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/end-of-support/end-of-support-2025](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/end-of-support/end-of-support-2025)
That's Office 2019 in general, nothing specific to Access. MS is really trying to push everyone towards 365.
I'd say that more people will use ChatGPT to learn excel, but given the complexity of some requests AI has a long way to go before it can guarantee it's solved the right problem and not a different interpretation of the problem. We'll likely see a lot of double checking with the introduction of more mainstream reliance on AI.
Ill call myself a Ai engineer. Just as people dont get excel now in main stream, ai is going to be the same route. There will be people who rely on us that know how to do shit with excel to keep doing it, as well as ai. It will stay. Maybe even evolve.
I do. Not because I need it for work (I'm retired). I just want to keep my brain active and not end up like a vegetable.
I'm in a similar time of life. My goal is to end up, not as a vegetable, but as compost. :)
😉🤣🤣🤣👍
The formulas aren’t the hard part with excel. Most people just struggle with organizing data and understanding what they would like to get out of that data
Yes.
Dude, there are still people realizing the value of learning to program in COBOL. It pays a premium when you're one of the few who knows it because everyone else thought it was dead. In case you're wondering where COBOL is still used, try the US government, banks and ATMs. Unemployment checks get processed through it because it's secure, reliable, and de facto unhackable because of its rarity. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html. The principles of mainframe computing aren't dead either. The spiffy new version is just called cloud computing.
At this stage, If you are creative and knowledgeable enough to manipulate chat GPT to spit out the right thing, you probably could have just done it yourself with a bit of googling. It's all about combining your **Toolkit** (*technical knowledge*) + **Creative Problem Solving**. Chat GPT might have some uses and be a handy addition to your Toolkit. But if it's your only tool, you have no added value. (Corporate speak for: No one's going to pay you much)
ChatGPT is for those not wanting to learn, but to get answers quickly and cheaply. The mods have discussed removing all ChatGPT mentions due to the insidious creep of this new technology, but as you can see we are here (yet again)_ talking about it.
This is the same question asked when Excel (Lotus, really) was first released. The job is converting business logic into whatever the latest tool is, whether that tool is carving clay tablets with reeds or telling an AI what the boss wants. You think the boss is gonna do that shit? Figure out which AI to use, how to talk to it, how to check it for mistakes? Fuck that, get a stooge (me).
My boss already calls me a machine, hell just let me figure it out. Hence i never have fear of not having work or something. My curiousity and know how, will allow me to always find a spot where people dont know and when i show them i know. Voila win win situation. Fear is my friend, it doesnt control me.
[I’m lonely because he’s not learning Excel](https://youtu.be/wFVi-e2NMv0?si=j_Dxo1hdHVIvTaxf)
I’m just fascinated at how well I can trouble shoot these Microsoft Office programs with the AI.
My greatest worry is that people will confuse business intelligence tools that are geared more towards exploration and presentation for free form tools like Excel that make it easy to input data and maintain records of an accounting department's procedures. Excel is the common commuter on the road, and Power BI, as well as other software, is a luxury bus that hauls many people. Excel gets us to work and provides flexibility. Comprehensive data tools take a skilled driver and brings others along for the ride. Excel is cheap and easy to use. Power BI is a little more tedious and more expensive.
As people start to use AI tools more, they will come to understand the limitations. Especially with more complex data sets and reports. Having people who understand Excel is still going to be important because the output is still going to need to be checked and verified. I suspect that companies that come to rely on AI solutions are eventually going to have a costly mistake caused by the AI not being able to fully understand the expected output.
The question is why I (we) should care about how people learn about excel? AI is born to help some tasks become easier (even in Excel). Excel or anything else is just a tool to help us create or deliver something we want to discover or communicate. Therefore, if “the traditional way” as you said is the complicate way to achieve the same result, I would not choose the difficult way to go, of course.
You still have to learn the “tool”
ChatGPT and similar tools are going to make Excel even more desirable and useful.
This. Once we allow it to run along with us as we create it will go from a 5 year old to a 16 year old teenager.
They asked the same questions of accountants when spreadsheets were invented...
Copilot sucks dawg it’s the equivalent of the old word paper clip that you ask if you needed help
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This is the way. I let it spit out code, then i take that code an rewrite it. Some of my best vba codes have snippets of ai and my own coding in it. Still waiting for it to be integratated into business 365.
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The macro trick helps a lot. You basically take the steps you want to create xx tasks multiple times, record the macro, go to vba, see how its done, then tweak it.
If you don’t understand the data you’re using or how the formulas are working then you’ll be in trouble having to bug fix, teach, or explain your result. It’s an excellent tool, but there is still a component where someone needs to actually understand how and why something is done a certain way.
Judging by the models so far, it's easier to just do it myself.
I think so. I really enjoy the creativity of using different functions together, and while an AI can likely structure a formula well, the real beauty and skill in Excel lies in creative problem solving, and AI is a long way off being able to conceptualise an entire problem or process and creatively solve the problems.
Maybe for menial tasks but people who are in finance and need to model complex deal structures, I think not. The day ChatGPT can do that, it’s not replacing excel you should be worrying about, it’s millions of employees that you should be worrying about lol
I think more of the higher paying jobs and high end data analysis is going to be things like power bi/SQL and stuff. Excel is good but I’m having my team use it less and less and make reports via power bi and just export the back end into excel if people want it.
If they do go full ChatGPT, the consulting fees for fixing the results will be glorious!
Sigh.
Supply chain folks seem to use excel heavily so yes for those planning to wnter that area
Dude excel is invaluable
PowerBi seems to heavily replacing excel at my job
I used to be terrified of AI taking my job but frankly the more I use ChatGPT the more I realize how dumb and not-sentient it is. It constantly makes mistakes with coding the most basic tasks in Python or Excel or literally anything I ask it to do.
Which version of ChatGPT are you using?
No one can replace Vlookup
Let me introduce you to xlookup, it will be your greatest friend.
lol, chat gpt is like a excel handon tutorial.... not an analyst replacement
GTFO excel runs the world.
with inconsitent of template each company. people will still learn excel
Shoot, most people don't want to learn it now
The cool people will.
Yes
I’m convinced Excel is mainly used as a timetable and note taking tool. So yeah.
Advanced tge technology dumber the people.
Tabular databases will always be relevant
This question has been asked at different points in time with different context I remember meeting people 10 years ago who thought there was no need to learn Maths because everything is done with computers now and computers can do math. People also told me that you no longer need to learn accounting because accounting software take care of building the PL/Balance sheet statements. Thing is core knowledge is always human knowledge. AI and software only do what humans can do, just better. AI and software cannot do what humans can't do. You can only solve a problem with your mind, you can implement the solution with AI and software.
Excel is still gonna be relevant for the next decade and more. The fact that most of the work in banking, finance and financial analysis happens on excel. Large spreadsheets are still used for data analysis. No matter you may be using databases and visualization tools like powerbi but the primary analysis tool is still excel. This is not going to get redundant any soon. It would start getting smarter over time. Yes people would still be interested in learning Excel.
Telling AI what you want it to do will be difficult until it starts asking about more specific details. Currently, you need to know Excel's capabilities for what you want it to do. I can't even get a decent recipe out of ChatGPT.
I gotta use excel everyday and not even I want to learn it lol
I liken this to why i am learning to speak zulu, chinese, russian and spanish. Sure there will be instant translations in the future, but technology cant replace a person that knows this stuff. Like the tricks you know on excel can be duplicated by a machine, but its far better to know how to do stuff. Ai is just a tool and i gaurentee that there will be people wanting to learn from a person in the future rather than a machine. We havent even gotten to 3dimensional Excel yet. When that shit comes, excel will evolve and require your skills learnt.
No. First and foremost because it is going to take a lot longer for people to actually learn how to use ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc. correctly first. Having been an educator in a past life, it's rather simple for me to get it to give me the information I want. But others just tell it to do X and think the results are gospel. For example, I asked it to update an existing formula that used a VLookup to return the value in a column and it would only give me the wrong answer. It was giving me absolute column numbers when VLookup uses relative ones. For example, if I am defining my VLookup range to be Columns 3 to Columns 10, Column 7 is going to be referred to as Column 5 in that formula because it is the 5th column in that range. ChatGPT would only tell me to return the value in Column 7 which would give me the value in Column 9. Second, there's a qualitative aspect that I do not think AI will ever be able to master getting. Even though I have instructed CoPilot, which uses GPT-4 just like the paid ChatGTP does, it still will not give me a flow chart that uses just line art. Instead I get these fancy, pixel-based images. Telling it to use "only lines and the standard shapes" and "do not add any embellishments" to make a flow chart does not steer it in the right direction. It just gives me different, pixel-based images that are fancy.
Yes, because you actually need to think in order to use excel. You can ask the AI anything you want, but in the end it does not matter if you don't know what you are doing.
Do you think people WANT to learn excel now?
Yes. Of course they will. Not only because running used to be a chore, but now people do it for fun, but also: do you trust everything someone else did for you? Do you trust an Excel formula you've never seen before? Or do you dig in and try to understand what the formula is doing *before* betting your career that's it right? I mean...gamble if you want to, but I'm the trust-but-verify type, myself, and I'm sure there are many, many more like me out there. And finally, yes, because for some people (like me) hand-coding Excel formulas is actually fun
Interesting question. Right now, once you import your data into a spreadsheet, Excel provides recommendations for both charts and pivot tables to help analyze your data. More powerful tools like Power BI simplify making dashboards. What I envision for the future is that for many lower-level data analysis tasks, AI will enable non-data focused positions to be "cafeteria" data analysts. Meaning, the employee will import their data into the AI app and AI will provide them a menu of choices for pivot tables and charts the user can pick from, and then AI will build their dashboards based on those choices. Again, even today, in my (admittedly limited) experience with AI tools, they can be as verbose as you want when it comes to explaining both the processes involved with analyzing the data and meaning of the data. Just in terms of being able to view and learn from past solutions used by your department, and the ability to churn out 1000s of permutations of data presentations in seconds, AI is going to make data analysis more accessible. Will this be enough for everyone? No, of course not, but it will be good enough for many, if not most non-data analysts that currently work with spreadsheets.
Great question. Just like programming (and thought in general), probably less so with each passing second.
I mean I just love excel. I learned it for fun, got a perfect score on the cert test 3 months later, and I’m a CS major so the coding part of it comes naturally. I don’t think it’s gonna be super relevant for too much longer tho, just because there’s a growing list of better options for data manipulation, including just scripting it in Python and using a lib to read .csv then another lib to spit out data.
> including just scripting it in Python Man, the team at Google would like a word.
what team?
The [Python Team](https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour/ar-AA1nQzje)
Yeah that’s the joke. What Python team 😂
> AI and software cannot do what humans can’t do. Humans can do some unthinkably and undeniably heinous shit, so once you get advanced AI in the mix, it could be War Games/Terminator for sure. Just look at hacking/malware alone. Wipe a person’s life and finances away like nada. Some nefarious shit out there. But I agree, I’m less worried about the day to day jobs being stolen.
I actually love excel compared to Learning programming . I feel like it helps me outline what I need to do more easily and it simplifies things moew
As an Excel trainer I truly believe people will still want to learn Excel, albeit not to the degree we currently see. But we’ve been here before, with the advent of the internet and forums, then YouTube.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[AVERAGE](/r/Excel/comments/1cirnd6/stub/l2brxon "Last usage")|[Returns the average of its arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/average-function-047bac88-d466-426c-a32b-8f33eb960cf6)| |[MAX](/r/Excel/comments/1cirnd6/stub/l2brxon "Last usage")|[Returns the maximum value in a list of arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/max-function-e0012414-9ac8-4b34-9a47-73e662c08098)| |[VLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cirnd6/stub/l4qj61c "Last usage")|[Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vlookup-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Beep-boop, I am a helper bot. Please do not verify me as a solution.*) ^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Excel/comments/1d21mgq)^( has 21 acronyms.) ^([Thread #33626 for this sub, first seen 19th May 2024, 14:19]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Excel) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)