this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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iiiiiiitttttttttttt
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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The text field says
=COPILOT("sum the numbers above"). It doesn't work that way. Excel does not have any concept of what "above" means here. Those numbers are not used in the calculation whatsoever. To reference those numbers, the field should say=COPILOT("sum the numbers in", A1:A3).What the user did here was ask the LLM to generate some text based on a text prompt and no other data, and the LLM decided to answer with a string containing only digits.
Excel knows the address of the calling function.
Yes, but "above" just goes into the LLM, which does who-knows-what with it, and certainly isn't designed to address cells that way. So to the LLM that's just like any other arbitrary text.
I don't believe even Microsoft are this stupid. The llm will have tools to interrogate the spreadsheet.
You give them too much credit.
There would be no way to do that reliably. There's too much weird stuff people might say to reference things, and the LLM would definitely act on the wrong cells more often than not.
Excel already has a perfectly unambiguous way to provide a specific range of cells, Which is why the
=COPILOT()function lets you supply those in the second parameter. I'm assuming they get passed to the LLM as context, likely encoded as a markdown table. LLMs love parsing markdown, apparently.The user provided no such range of cells, though, so the LLM is most likely seeing none of those other cells, and is just working based on random values from the Internet.