Comment on Very normal and safe
vrek@programming.dev 1 week agoWait… Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can’t see the data in excel? That’s insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don’t see why excel wouldn’t be able to…
bus_factor@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you’re working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.
vrek@programming.dev 1 week ago
Wow, yeah most people who want to use a function like this will mess that up…
bus_factor@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I genuinely cannot think of a single use-case where you would want Excel to look at your entire spreadsheet without it being a horrible mistake. You definitely do not want AI to do math for you, and that is thankfully not what this thing is designed for.
vrek@programming.dev 1 week ago
True but I could see using Ai to write a function which does the math… Like I write a prompt (simplified example as I’m on my phone) like “sum all the values above A4 and place result in A4” and the Ai should then write the function “sum(A1, A3)” and place it in cell A4