Learning Generative AI Tools for Excel

Chapter 11. Landscape of Excel AI Add-Ins

When you first encounter AI in Excel, it’s easy to think that one tool, specifically Copilot or ChatGPT, should be enough. After all, Copilot can summarize data, explain formulas, generate charts, and even help you write functions using plain language. So why would you ever need additional add-ins? If there’s already an AI assistant built in, isn’t everything else redundant?

As you begin to work with a real spreadsheet, which might include messy text fields, inconsistent product names, multilingual comments, nested formulas, and dashboards that need to be refreshed every month, you’ll notice that not all AI capabilities are created equal. Copilot is excellent at helping you explore and understand. It’s a conversational partner. You ask, it answers. You request, it responds. But Copilot isn’t always optimized for the kind of controlled, reproducible operations you need in professional workbooks. In addition, Copilot comes with a cost.

That’s where third-party AI add-ins come in. They don’t replace Copilot; they specialize. Most of them provide a free plan: if you have a small dataset, you can manipulate it completely for free, using the free credit provided by the add-ins. Each add-in solves a different category of problem. Some add-ins bring AI directly into the grid, giving you formula-like functions that you can fill down just like SUM() or VLOOKUP(). Others automate end-to-end workflows: cleaning data, creating sheets, building charts, ...