Learning Generative AI Tools for Excel

Chapter 4. Advanced Operations with ChatGPT

When I started programming in the early 2000s, fixing a bug in the code was a real challenge. If something wasn’t working, you didn’t even know where to start. It could take hours, sometimes days, of trying to check line by line in the hope of finding that bug in the code. Then, suddenly, a colleague or friend would arrive and, with a quick glance, identify the problem and point it out to you as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And you, caught between disbelief and gratitude, would thank them heartily.

Then came the internet, Web 2.0, and programming forums. If your code threw errors, all you had to do was use a search engine, and sooner or later, you would find someone who had had the same problem and had already solved it. Debugging times have shortened dramatically.

Today, with ChatGPT, everything is even faster. Just paste the code and ask where the error is. You’ll have the solution in a few minutes, sometimes in a few seconds. When I think back to 20 years ago, when I could have spent entire days on a single bug, the progress is impressive. But it doesn’t end there. With generative AI, you no longer have to write code; ChatGPT does it directly. Just describe the problem, and it returns the code ready to use, both for programming in languages such as Python, Java, or C# and for creating advanced and efficient formulas in Excel. And that’s exactly what you’ll see in this chapter. More precisely, this chapter covers ...