ChatGPT and Excel -- trust, but verify

TL;DR

This paper critically examines ChatGPT's utility in complex Excel tasks, demonstrating its limitations and emphasizing the importance of testing solutions, while providing practical guidance for integrating ChatGPT with Excel.

Contribution

It highlights the limitations of ChatGPT for complex problems and offers a practical method to integrate ChatGPT with Excel for enhanced usability.

Findings

ChatGPT is useful for simple Excel tasks but can mislead on complex problems.

Testing ChatGPT solutions is essential to ensure correctness.

Provides a practical guide for integrating ChatGPT with Excel.

Abstract

This paper adopts a critical approach to ChatGPT, showing how its huge reach makes it a useful tool for people with simple requirements but a bad, even misleading guide to those with more complex problems which are more rarely present in the training data and even more rarely have straightforward solutions. It works through four exercises in creating lookup formulas using chatbots, showing the need to test the offered solutions. They are a simple lookup, a lookup to the left, a match of two values at the same time, and intentionally confusing the models by using common language with technical meaning in Excel. It concludes with a practical guide for how to add an Excelscript button, with system and user prompts, to the ChatGPT API into the Excel desktop environment, supported by a blog post giving the technical details for those interested.