Can't get AI to accurately analyze a spreadsheet – help needed | Hacker News Reader

Can't get AI to accurately analyze a spreadsheet – help needed

3 pointszyruh10 comments

I work in marketing. Analyzing spreadsheets of data and drawing conclusions is a regular part of the job. I have pro accounts with both GPT and Perplexity. Neither one of them seems to be able to accurately analyze spreadsheets. They either miss portions of the data or draw wrong conclusions. I need help! Any thoughts or recommendations for other tools?

View on HN

https://www.tryshortcut.ai/

Thank you so much!

I’m not clear on what that actually is. An alternative spreadsheet app you would use instead of Google Sheets?

Jupyter, pandas, etc.

Thank you! I'll check these out.

I had no issues dropping a demo 100-row spreadsheet into Claude and was able to ask questions. This particular spreadsheet was in the old-school .xsl format, and only Claude just dealt with it.

ChatGPT accepted it but said it couldn't do anything with it because it was too old. Perplexity wouldn't even accept it.

Once I converted to .xlsx, it worked fine in all of them.

Not only did Claude not complain about the old format, it wrote a short JavaScript program it used to do the analysis, which you could download and use.

Get an MCP for your spreadsheet [1], which would enable any LLM that supports MCP to do more sophisticated functions.

I asked Claude what it can do with spreadsheets; here's what came back:

    Claude can perform a wide variety of tasks with spreadsheets! Here are the main categories of what I can do:
    
    ## Data Analysis & Statistics
    - Calculate averages, medians, standard deviations, and other statistical measures
    - Find correlations between different columns
    - Identify outliers and anomalies in the data
    - Group data by categories and analyze patterns
    - Perform trend analysis over time periods
    
    ## Data Cleaning & Processing
    - Remove duplicates and handle missing values
    - Standardize formats (dates, phone numbers, addresses)
    - Split or combine columns
    - Filter and sort data based on multiple criteria
    - Validate data quality and identify inconsistencies
    
    ## Visualizations & Charts
    - Create interactive charts (bar, line, pie, scatter plots, histograms)
    - Build dashboards with multiple visualizations
    - Generate heatmaps and other specialized chart types
    - Create geographic visualizations if location data is present
    
    ## Business Intelligence
    - Calculate key performance indicators (KPIs)
    - Perform financial analysis (profit margins, growth rates, etc.)
    - Analyze sales data, customer segments, or inventory
    - Create summary reports and executive dashboards
    - Compare performance across different time periods or categories
    
    ## Advanced Analysis
    - Build predictive models for forecasting
    - Perform cohort analysis for customer behavior
    - Calculate conversion rates and funnel analysis
    - Cross-tabulate data to find relationships
    - Generate pivot table-style summaries
    
    ## Data Transformation
    - Convert between different file formats
    - Restructure data (pivot/unpivot operations)
    - Merge data from multiple sheets or sources
    - Create calculated fields and derived metrics
    - Export processed data in various formats
    
    ## Automation & Workflows
    - Create step-by-step data processing workflows
    - Generate code that you can reuse for similar analyses
    - Build templates for recurring reports
    - Set up automated calculations and formulas
    
    Would you like me to demonstrate any of these capabilities with your current spreadsheet, or do you have a specific analysis goal in mind?

[1]: https://www.pulsemcp.com/servers?q=spreadsheet

This is very helpful insight. Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com