Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel | Hacker News Reader

Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel

github.com

108 pointsrahimnathwani29 comments

I saw this today on X. It's built on top of the pi coding agent (same one used by openclaw). It uses pi-web-ui ( https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages%2Fweb...).

What surprised me was that it works with oauth tokens from consumer AI subscriptions, and even free ones like Antigravity. Some of this is inherited from pi, but the author did some extra work to build a proxy to allow auth to work even from within the Excel sidebar.

I'm not sure how it works and what the role of the backend is. But I hope to test it side by side with 'Claude for Excel', which I also happened to install today.

(I tried both on something basic just to check they were installed correctly.)

Is pi better than opencode?

opencode is great, but I'm a big pi fan - pi has a minimal core that is hackable+extensible by design and is aware of its own docs. So your coding agent can mod your coding agent exactly as you like. https://pi.dev/

> and even free ones like Antigravity

48 hours later on hn: "Google just banned my 27 years old account for absolutely NO REASON and the customer service is useless!!!"

Do you plan supporting the web version of Excel?

I’m a heavy Excel user and would love to try this, but I’m on Linux, so I can use only the online version of Excel.

you can try it in the web version, download the manifest file form his website. Than go in the webversion to add in -> my add ins -> upload and upload the manifest file. Only downside is that it will disappear after a week or so.

I might do once I get local to a good spot. Should in theory be fine on web... but haven't tested/tried

Works surprisingly well, even the connection to local host to use my codex sub, would have not thoughts thats possible ;) Really cool work!

why not use a vm/wine for a native experience (though, tbf, native excel is kind of hot garbage these days compared to older versions...)

I’m building it

It’s got various things to clean up but the idea is to bring the spirit of pi (an OSS coding agent that can extend itself and gives you maximal freedom) to excel.

So it has things that claude for excel will never have - like tmux, the ability to use any model provider that works with pi, and of course extensions

built in lets you play snake while your agent works; I added some personal ones for slash commands, auto-pulling fx, ..

And nice touches like user and file agents.md

still quite a lot of work I need to juggle with my new job, but I’ve been using it all week with decent results

Just tried it, very cool! Do you have experience with limits, like is there a max table size it can reason about?

generally been fine, adding some optimisations over wkd to increase. Primary thing I want to fix = right now full tool results get passed direct into context so can overflow if using python on a large sheet

https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel/issues/377

Quick doubt: did you modify Pi to make it browser compatible?

1. If yes, does it understand skills?

2. If it does have skills support, how are skills fed into it in a browser environment (without the filesystem, folders and stuff)

Didn't have to modify. OG Pi is made to be extended & used as a building block so closer to say I wrapped it As for skills, yes and it's a virtual filesystem

Something, well may things, kill about Microsoft. The Office suite have a wonderful API and loading a JS app with an an interface in the apps works great.

We took an Elm app from our web app and put into Excel to control downloading reports. Works great.

Except you have to side load this and that is a pain - or you have to go through the MS App Store, which is a whole other headache.

If anyone has any advice on making it easy for customers to install Office apps please let me know.

If your customers are in the same Microsoft tenant as you (i.e., company employees), you can use Integrated Apps to deploy the add-ins to them.

1. Host the add-in static assets at some endpoint

2. Ask your IT admin to upload your add-in manifest file to Integrated Apps

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage...

You can write add-ins for Excel. I’ve used this .NET component library to build Winform apps that use the add-in interface to 13 years. Super simple and it uses the COM interface and supports all Windows Office versions.

https://www.add-in-express.com/add-in-net/index.php

Question. Does this help actually build with excel or just analyze what data is in excel?

For example, “build a Gantt chart base on … and suggest a the best layout for the data to drive the chart.”

Gets me no where with copilot but it always just wants to answer questions about my data which isn’t helpful to me.

I just tried it, its very cool, so it can not just summarize data, but also create and format table, however it can not create charts yet. I asked to create me on and it created another table and told me what i need to do in the UI to create a chart based on it

Ah got it, thanks a ton for the feedback! I suppose that’s helpful but not too different than using Google. There’s a ton of chart types that aren’t native that I need to create and so usually just google for specifics, it’s not always something I do with high frequency so don’t have the muscle memory of it. Would be very cool if I could find a tool that would fully execute the gui actions needed.

I have similar wants for other software. Where for example AI can do image generation, what I often what is it to take over my Photoshop app and perform all the steps like a graphic designer would. Then I’d have layers and such. Then I could take that to animation software and have an ai create me a rig and what not. I’ve not found anything quite like this yet

Anyone have a link to a video of it in action?

i'll prob add over wkd hadn't bothered as still making changes

there are about a dozen startups doing variations of this right now. it's good to see an open source alternative pop up

yes felt long overdue for OSS :)

Neat! Anything like this but for MS Word?

maybe one day

track changes is the big one to get right

Clippy's revenge is nigh!

Can it remove automatic date formatting?

started using pi agent recently, I'm digging it

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