ChatGPT Excel Plugins: Incredible Productivity Tools

ChatGPT Excel Plugin

We all know that ChatGPT can help us solve Excel problems, but it needs a lot of contexts and even well-structured prompt engineering to understand what you want to do with your data.

That’s why ChatGPT Excel plugins are so awesome. They enable ChatGPT to read your entire sheet, which means you just need to select the reference field and type what you want to do, and ChatGPT will do the rest.

Table Content :

What Is A ChatGPT Excel Plugin?
Best Free ChatGPT Excel Plugins
- Numerous.ai
- AI Companion
Can ChatGPT Excel Plugins Be Trusted?
- Do Not Blindly Trust The AI
- Your Requests Get Sent To OpenAI
Should You Use ChatGPT Excel Plugins?

What Is A ChatGPT Excel Plugin?

The Beginning

When ChatGPT first came out, people were amazed by its potential in Excel. That’s why the Internet was rushing to be the first one to answer the question: “How to incorporate ChatGPT into Excel?”

Then, a few months later, something amazing happened. The first generation of GPT-powered Excel plugins was born and popularized thanks to this video by Leila Gharani.

This version was like having a GPT assistant in your Excel sheet, who could help you with formulas, functions, and calculations.

But this is far from what people expected from an Excel plugin.

The Born Of Powerful Excel Tools

Just one month later, things got even better. A new generation of ChatGPT Excel plugins was released, and they were incredible. These plugins could access the data from your sheet and create accurate formulas, extract data, classify and analyze data, make predictions,... All with simple prompts.

This opened up new possibilities in data analysis, data science, and marketing with the help of AI. You could do things that would normally take hours or days in minutes or seconds. You could discover insights that you would never find otherwise.

Some of the features of these plugins are:

Data extraction: You can extract any kind of data from your sheet.
Data classification: You can classify your data into categories, labels, or groups, based on your criteria or predefined models
Data analysis: You can analyze your data using various methods, such as descriptive statistics, correlation, regression, clustering, or sentiment analysis
Data prediction: You can make predictions based on your data, such as forecasting, trend analysis, or anomaly detection.

What To Expect

GPT4 And Copilot

In March 2023, Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that works across all Microsoft Office applications, including Excel.

According to their announcement, Copilot can do even more complicated tasks than our current plugins, like visualizing data, debugging formulas, revealing correlations, and pinpointing what you need by understanding the context of your queries.

Surprisingly, ChatGPT can do even more than that. It can pull data from the web and make a whole Excel sheet for us with the introduction of web search and powerful plugins.

But we don’t know when Copilot will be available or when ChatGPT can pull off such complicated tasks, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have. And what we have is pretty awesome. The ChatGPT Excel plugins are incredible productivity tools that can help you with your data problems in a natural and easy way.

Best Free ChatGPT Excel Plugins

Numerous.ai

Numerous.AI

This add-in became popular on Reddit a few months ago, thanks to its powerful features and user-friendly interface.

It has a neat toolbar where you can find all the features you need, such as data extraction, data analysis, data prediction, etc. Each feature has a short description that explains what it does and how to use it.

The General function at the top is the most tricky one to understand. It might take you some time to get used to it, but once you do, you will be amazed by what it can do. The creator of the add-in, user rwal7, also added a link to his tutorial videos on YouTube so you can learn more about how to use it effectively.

Price: The add-in uses a token system, where 1 token equals 500 characters of input and output

Free plan: You get 60 free tokens, which is enough for some basic tasks
Paid plans: You can pay $10 - 12/month for 1000-25000 tokens/month, depending on your needs and usage

How to install Numerous.ai

Step 1: Visit numerous.ai/get
Step 2: Click “Open in Excel”
Step 3: Click “Open Excel” in the browser pop up
Step 4: Click the Numerous.ai Icon on the Excel toolbar
Step 5: Sign up with your Microsoft or Google Account and you are ready to go.

AI Companion

Compared to Numerous.ai, this AI Companion is much simpler to use, but also less flexible. All you have to do is write a prompt on top of your sheet, copy the sheet and the prompt, click the

AI Companion icon and your answer will be generated in a separate sheet. You can use this add-in for tasks like data extraction, and data classification, ….

Price: AI Companion is completely free. However, it uses ChatGPT API key, so you will be charged by OpenAI according to your usage. You can check the OpenAI pricing page for more details.

How to install AI Companion

Step 1: Visit https://pythonandvba.com/mytoolbelt/
Step 2: Scroll down and choose “Download for free” if you want the free plan or “Buy now” for the Pro plan
Step 3: Extract the downloaded file and copy the “MyToolBelt” file
Step 4: Open Excel and Go to Options
Step 5: Click “Add-ins”
Step 6: At the Manage section at the bottom of the Add-ins tab, Click “Go”
Step 7: The Add-ins window will show up and choose “Browse”
Step 8: Paste the MyToolBelt file in the Popup window and click “Open”
Step 9: Tick the MyToolBelt box and press ok. The MyToolBelt add-in can be accessible at your Excel ribbon.

Can ChatGPT Excel Plugins Be Trusted?

We have to admit that these plugins are really impressive. But if you are planning to use them, there are two things you must consider:

Do Not Blindly Trust The AI

Although these add-ins might seem very smart, they have the same flaws as ChatGPT, which is that they sometimes give false or inaccurate information.

This is especially true for tasks that involve predictions and data analysis, which require a lot of domain knowledge and expertise. If you are working on large projects that require detailed analysis, then you should take the AI’s answer as a suggestion, not as a fact. You should always double-check the results and use your own judgment.

Your Requests Get Sent To OpenAI

Since these add-ins run on ChatGPT and OpenAI API key, your data will be sent to OpenAI. This means that any data that you include in your request will be shared with OpenAI. This might raise some AI privacy and security concerns, especially if you have any sensitive or confidential data.

Last month, OpenAI improved their security policy, where they said they wouldn’t use customer data to train their AI models. But this does not guarantee that your data will be completely safe and protected. So if you have any sensitive or confidential data, we would advise against using these plugins.

Should You Use ChatGPT Excel Plugins?

Well, this will mostly depend on you. These plugins are great examples of how the right use of AI can help us improve our work.

They can make your Excel tasks easier and faster, and help you unleash your creativity and productivity. But they also come with a cost. Apart from money, your information is at risk of being leaked all over the internet.

So until Copilot comes out, we think that these plugins should only be used as a training method, so that you can take full advantage of Copilot when it is available