• BennyInc@feddit.org
    7·
    2 hours ago

    Storytime. I tried to use copilot to get some rather convoluted dataset analyzed in Excel. Not a huge task, but basically I wanted it to count me the occurrences of certain values, grouped by that value. Of course that’s easy with Pivot, and there’s probably also some formula for that, but it wasn’t very urgent, so I figured I’d see what Copilot could do. Now of course I didn’t want to use that =COPILOT() formula, but instead asked Copilot to create me a formula to correctly count how often each value occurs. So it created this multiple lines long formula, which from first glance seemed plausible (though way overcomplicated). I asked it to insert this into cell F13. „Of course“, it said — and then proceeded to do nothing. Confronted with this, it tried again, and failed. After some asking why it didn’t just go that, it told me that this is not possible in Excel in Mac. I’d have to use the web version of Excel. WTF? Why doesn’t the fully featured version do this? Well, of course: Microsoft doesn’t like Apple too much. So I tried copy pasting the formula and failed. Some syntax error cropped up. I asked Copilot about this, and it came back with a typical „oh sorry, my bad, here is the correct formula“ and the same formula again. Of course this failed. And since I didn’t want to debug this stupid thing (the error message of course also didn’t give any indication what exactly could be wrong), I just created a Pivot and got my result in seconds.

    Now this is only one of many experiences I had when trying to really use that 365 Copilot for anything useful. Maybe I should write a book about it. And then ask Copilot to write a book about it and put this into the epilogue.

  • arrow74@lemmy.zip
    5·
    4 hours ago

    If people stopped trying to make it something it’s not and built it as a proper tool, this is one of the few things AI is good for. It can proccess data quite well, or could. Because of all that’s being shoved in the hallucinations are getting worse, but I’ve been able to use it to proccess data sets with very specific instructions. Saved me hours of tedious work.

    But a way to organize and proccess data faster isn’t exciting for investors so

  • Bubs12@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    22·
    7 hours ago

    Top comment from the last time this was posted pointed out how the image is cropped on the left. We are most definitely looking at rows 11-14 and there are numbers above that are not being shown.

    I just want them to remove the god awful copilot button that showed up in the corner on top of cells in my spreadsheet with no way to move or hide it. It’s not even on the ribbon anymore where I can ignore it. Fuckin’ pricks.

    • bus_factor@lemmy.world
      15·
      6 hours ago

      It’s a lot simpler than that. =COPILOT() can only see cells provided in the second parameter, and the user didn’t provide one. It’s just giving you what a typical answer to “compute the sum of the numbers above” is.

      • smeenz@lemmy.nz
        3·
        2 hours ago

        In other words, they may as well have given it “make up a number”

        … though with all the hallucinations, it would probably return “elephant” intermittently

  • bus_factor@lemmy.world
    19·
    5 hours ago

    It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for =COPILOT() says a few things which are relevant to understand what we’re seeing here:

    • You’re not supposed to use it for math
    • It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument

    In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they’re just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request “sum the numbers above”. And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.

    • hayvan@piefed.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Big part of the problem with AI features is that way too many people believe they are silver bullet for everything and they are marketed like that.

      Computer savvy people know better ways of doing math and can figure out that context is needed.

      Overwhelming majority of people, including bosses and managers, are too lazy and ignorant to care about the points you mention.

    • PineRune@lemmy.world
      26·
      8 hours ago

      Keep in mind that if you allow a user to make this mistake, people will DEFINITELY make this mistake. A lot.

      • Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        9·
        7 hours ago

        And if that’s true, just imagine something any more compex, that could get lost amid the rest of the slop for a long time

        • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          7 hours ago

          Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.

          • Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            5·
            7 hours ago

            Every job is just some sort of troubleshooting, it just makes it harder to do when your manual is making stuff up

    • Pyr@lemmy.ca
      15·
      7 hours ago

      … You aren’t supposed to use it for math… In excel? What is the point?

      • bus_factor@lemmy.world
        16·
        7 hours ago

        People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.

        There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.

        • Pyr@lemmy.ca
          1·
          4 hours ago

          True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn’t figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it’s result though

    • vrek@programming.devEnglish
      13·
      9 hours ago

      Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71…

      Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it’s just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn’t think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense… Wait holy shit… I got it

      2+3 = 5

      1 = 1

      Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) “1”+(str) “5” = “15”

      • bus_factor@lemmy.world
        8·
        8 hours ago

        It didn’t consider any of the numbers, because the user didn’t provide the context argument to the function.

        • vrek@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          7 hours ago

          I’m betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can’t confirm as I don’t use excel but that seems to be the issue.

          • bus_factor@lemmy.world
            4·
            7 hours ago

            No, it’s a lot more basic than that. You provide =COPILOT() the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn’t provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.

            • vrek@programming.devEnglish
              3·
              6 hours ago

              Wait… 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
                4·
                5 hours 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.devEnglish
          2·
          7 hours ago

          Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I’m betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.

  • homes@piefed.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Whenever I’m feeling suicidal, I remind myself that I have never had to use Excel

    It doesn’t always work, but it often works

    Edit: although, I did have a brief affair with Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes, back in the day