Learning Generative AI Tools for Excel

Preface

I am a computer engineer, and I have always had a deep fascination with data. To me, everything around us can be transformed into data. And when you talk about data, sooner or later, you talk about spreadsheets. When you talk about spreadsheets, one name inevitably comes to mind: Excel.

I wrote my first Excel macro when I was about 15 years old, sitting at an old computer with just 16 MB of memory. For years, Excel was my primary tool: formulas typed by hand, endless searches on Stack Overflow, and scattered blog posts to fix what was broken or unclear. I vividly remember spending hours tracking down a single error in a formula or trying to understand how to format a table exactly as I needed. Excel was powerful, but it demanded patience, precision, and a fair amount of frustration.

Eventually, I moved to Python. It felt more natural to express logic through code than through a visual grid of cells. Programming offered clarity and structure, and results often came faster. And yet, no matter how far I went with code, Excel was always there. The data I worked with lived in spreadsheets. Analysis began or ended in Excel. I still spent countless hours cleaning data, fixing formulas, adjusting layouts, and formatting tables, often staring at the screen until my eyes ached. That workflow felt unavoidable for a long time.

Today, that world already feels distant. The hours spent debugging formulas, hunting for syntax errors, or manually reshaping data are no longer a given. The ...