Memes

Storytime. I tried to use copilot to get some rather convoluted dataset analyzed in Excel. Not a huge task, but basically I wanted it to count me the occurrences of certain values, grouped by that value. Of course that’s easy with Pivot, and there’s probably also some formula for that, but it wasn’t very urgent, so I figured I’d see what Copilot could do. Now of course I didn’t want to use that =COPILOT() formula, but instead asked Copilot to create me a formula to correctly count how often each value occurs. So it created this multiple lines long formula, which from first glance seemed plausible (though way overcomplicated). I asked it to insert this into cell F13. „Of course“, it said — and then proceeded to do nothing. Confronted with this, it tried again, and failed. After some asking why it didn’t just go that, it told me that this is not possible in Excel in Mac. I’d have to use the web version of Excel. WTF? Why doesn’t the fully featured version do this? Well, of course: Microsoft doesn’t like Apple too much. So I tried copy pasting the formula and failed. Some syntax error cropped up. I asked Copilot about this, and it came back with a typical „oh sorry, my bad, here is the correct formula“ and the same formula again. Of course this failed. And since I didn’t want to debug this stupid thing (the error message of course also didn’t give any indication what exactly could be wrong), I just created a Pivot and got my result in seconds.

Now this is only one of many experiences I had when trying to really use that 365 Copilot for anything useful. Maybe I should write a book about it. And then ask Copilot to write a book about it and put this into the epilogue.