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Comment by mattas | Hacker News Reader

I'm not excited about having LLMs generate spreadsheets or formulas. But, I think LLMs could be particularly useful in helping me find inconsistent formulas or errors that are challenging to identify. Especially in larger, complex spreadsheets touched by multiple people over the course of months.

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For once in my life, I actually had a delightful interaction with an LLM last week. I was changing some text in an Excel sheet in a very progromatic way that could have easily been done with the regex functions in Excel. But I'm not really great with regex, and it was only 15 or so cells, so I was content to just do it manually. After three or four cells, Copilot figured out what I was doing and suggested the rest of the changes for me.

This is what I want AI to do, not generate wrong answers and hallucinate girlfriends.

Thanks for reminding me to check if the REGEXEXTRACT, REGEXREPLACE, and REGEXTEST functions had landed for me yet. They have! Good, because sometime in 2027 the library providing RegEx in VBA will be yanked. https://youtu.be/pGH9LdgkJio

One approach is to produce read-only data in BI tools: users are free to export anything they want and make their own spreadsheets, but those are for their own use only. Reference data is produced every day by a central, controlled process and cannot in any circumstance be modified by the end user.

I have implemented this a couple of times and not only does it work well, it tends to be fairly well accepted. People need spreadsheets to work on them, but generally they kind of hate sending those around via email. Having a reference source of data is welcomed.

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