Over the past six months, we’ve learned how AI can be used for many tasks: create artpowering one advanced chatbot, and so on. But what if you could use it to actually help you in your work?
If your work involves Excel, you’re in luck. A free site (with registration) does just that: Excel formulator.
Excel Formulator takes your instructions, in plain English, and turns them into an Excel formula. “Choose the highest value in column C and assign it to the cell to the right of the cell labeled “Big Spender” turns into =MAX(C:C) & “Big spender”. Copy the last one in the formula field into an Excel cell and you’ve saved yourself some time – or, for those who don’t have advanced knowledge of Excel, you now have a quick and dirty solution to an annoying problem.
Last year, ExcelFormulabot.com promised a similar goal: take a plain language prompt and turn it into a formula using AI. The site is still live, but it has evolved: now ExcelFormulabot only offers five free formula requests per month, while everything else costs $6.99 per month. (To be fair, the $6.99 plan offers unlimited requests and also saves previous requests.)
If you ever used AI art, you know that while it’s funny, it might not quite provide the artwork you want on the first try. Excel Formulator occasionally suffers from the same problem, in that you’re never quite sure what complexity it will easily parse and what it will just stumble over. Fortunately, Excel is set up so that false positives are (hopefully) rare: if Excel Formulator fails, you’ll instead see error messages like “#N/A” or “#REF” or “#NAME” in your spreadsheet. Occasionally the wording matters too: although I couldn’t get the site to look up and copy the contents of a cell whose row contained a specific word (“banana”) and whose column contained a second word (‘dog’), I was able to make it work by using the Excel column name “D” instead.
Both sites also work in reverse: if you have an existing formula in an Excel spreadsheet – one that a colleague came up with, say – you can plug that formula into the Explainer section of the site and it will attempt to decode it into plain language.
However, my struggles highlight two lessons: First, sites like Excel Formulator and ExcelFormulaBot don’t necessarily highlight which AI models they’ve been trained on — and they probably should, to point out which one is the most advanced. Second, it’s quite possible that more established sites like ExcelFormulabot will be superior just because they’ve been used more and presumably better trained as a result.
By the way, the site that solved my problem? The just jane and virally popular ChatGPT site, which can turn text prompts into detailed solutions. The places So good that the founders are considering offering a professional version. ChatGPT not only solved the lookup problem above, but also provided a detailed, helpful explanation along with the code:
=INDEX(A:Z,MATCH(“banana*”,A:A,0),MATCH(“dog”,1:1,0))
Mark Hachman/IDG
Professionals of all skill levels can turn their noses up at AI, but everyone else? In a pinch, it might be worth a try.
