I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.
Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.
I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far behind though.
Microsoft fumbled so badly here.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
Claude for Excel (I work in finance) was one of the absolutely critical reasons we added Anthropic enterprise licenses. But they've turned out to be quite expensive ($100/day for heavy users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.
Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all you need is a browser.
PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.
For added benefit, full screen?
Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.
I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output.
Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though).
SVG looks similar to the XML format of spreadsheets. I wonder if LLMs struggle with that?
I just spent a few hours trying to get GPT5.4 to write strict, git compatible patches and concluded this is a huge waste of time. It's a lot easier and more stable to do simple find/replace or overwrite the whole file each time. Same story in places like Unity or Blender. The ability to coordinate things in 3d is really bad still. You can get clean output using parametric scenes, but that's about it.
Damn that OAI valuation is like a sore boil that is about to explode.
Also once again, a lack of imagination from OAI. Damn vision really is super scarce huh.
meanwhile not that ant is genius, except the timing of dow drama right before Iran war.
We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on Excel Web). I remember fighting so hard to have it be called `context.sync()` instead of `context.executeAsync()`...
That being said, done poorly it can be slow as the round-trip time on web can be on the order of seconds (at least back then).
If you were working on the platform itself, then I would be interested in hearing your more detailed thoughts on the matters you mentioned (especially since I am developing an open source Excel Add-In Webcellar (https://github.com/Acmeon/Webcellar)).
What do you mean with a "OM" call? And why are they especially costly on Excel web (currently my add-in is only developed for desktop Excel, but I might consider adding support for Excel web in the future)?
In any case, `context.sync()` is much better than `context.executeAsync()`.
The reason those calls are expensive on Excel Web is that you're running your add-in in the browser, so every `.sync()` call has to go all the way to the server and back in order to see any changes. If you're doing those calls in a loop, you're looking at 500ms to 2-3s latency for every call (that was back then, it might be better now). On the desktop app it's not as bad since the add-in and the Excel process are on the same machine so what you're paying is mostly serialization costs.
Happy to answer more questions, though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have changed since.
Regardless, I have always preferred Excel desktop over Excel web (and other web based spreadsheet alternatives). This information makes me somewhat less interested in Excel web. Nonetheless, I find Excel Add-Ins useful, primarily because they bring the capabilities of JavaScript to Excel.
Excel has this legacy (but extremely powerful) core with very few people left that knows all of it. It has legacy bugs preserved for compatibility reasons as whole businesses are ran on spreadsheet that break if the bug is fixed (I’m not exaggerating). The view code for xldesktop is not layered particularly well either leading to a lot of dependencies on Win32 in xlshared (at least back then).
Is it doable? I’m sure. But the benefits are probably not worth the cost.
Honestly, I struggle to think about what has actually changed between Office 2013 and Office 2024 (and their Office 365 equivalents); I know the LAMBDA function was a big deal, but they made the UI objectively worse by wasting screen-space with ever-increasingly phatter non-touch UI elements; and the Python announcement was huge... before deflating like a popped party balloon when we learned how horribly compromised it was.
...but other than that, Excel remains exactly as frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a date string - today just as it was 15 years ago[1].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4896116/parsing-an-iso86...
Now that’s an acronym that I had forgotten about.
They (OAI+Anthropic) very much do not get exactly what these people are doing in the job (accounting+corporate finance+valuation+asset management) and what the actual production process is. These tools are irrelevant, disrupt flow and if anything just add noise to what one is doing.
They don't do the job, reliably or well. No amount of wishful thinking or extra tokens will change that.
Remember when Steve said 'The computers for the rest of us'?
I suppose it isn't a surprise. Are researchers/generally geeky people meant to be able to relate to the average person's day-to-day beyond their sphere? Lmao.
You can't produce stuff for people you don't understand. Understand being a very key term.
I know there are employees of those firms here that would love to know. But nah lmao.
Instead of answering with 6, it came up with 15. The comment was "If AI is doing this, a global financial crash is inevitable."
Might not be real but it is something to keep an eye on. Hopefully, they are a bit more cautious on how this is implemented.
You're not wrong, but you'd think that given their 27% stake in OpenAI they'd put more weight behind ChatGPT integration.
This seems like a security nightmare, which is especially relevant because sensitive data is often stored in Excel files.
This is counter to the old (security nightmare) COM model where processing could be local.
It seems one of the biggest barriers to people's adoption is concern over data leaving their ecosystem and then not being protected or being retained in some way.
Is this is an SLA that a small or medium sized company could get?
However, it may be important to note that these security considerations are relevant for most Office Add-Ins (and not just the ChatGPT add-in).
[for] ... users outside the EU.
I would never use Copilot for anything useful, but I do use OpenAI products.
It doesn't matter when you use something else wholesale under the covers, if you botch the token spent...
Microsoft, being Microsoft, will find a way to win no matter who that vendor ends up being.
Show HN: I've built a C# IDE, Runtime, and AppStore inside Excel
670 points | 179 comments
One of the main use cases was to analyze Excel data with SQL. I'm the kind of nerd that loves stuff like that, but stuff like that seems completely obsolete now.
Building an agent that can securely access systems of records, external data sources, and other files in your workspace—with context for the work you do outside of Excel—is where the revolution is at.
haneul•2h ago