Learning Generative AI Tools for Excel

Part IV. Stories and Solutions

Part IV is organized as a hands-on companion to the first three parts of the book, bringing together a collection of practical activities designed to reinforce the foundational skills introduced in the early chapters. The appendices focus on applied exercises that help you consolidate what you’ve learned by working directly with realistic spreadsheet scenarios. Part IV is structured as a short novel that defines what I call applied fiction, a technique for immersive learning.

Appendix A presents hands-on activities that reinforce the key topics from Part I of the book, using ChatGPT as a practical support tool. You’ll begin with data organization and visualization, practicing how to structure data clearly and create charts that communicate insights effectively. Next, you’ll work on building reusable templates, learning how to standardize layouts, formulas, and formatting to make recurring tasks faster and more consistent. Finally, you’ll explore basic macro creation, automating repetitive actions with simple recorded and edited macros to improve the efficiency of your workflow.

Appendix B is organized as a practical extension of Part II of the book, offering hands-on activities that help you apply Copilot to real data analysis workflows. The exercises are structured to follow the natural progression of a data project: you begin by preparing the data with Copilot, cleaning and structuring datasets for analysis. You then move on to basic statistics, ...