Wrong output and takes longer than the original method. Excellent, excellent
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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Hey, a server farm just burned through 250kw/hrs in 2 seconds and wasted 20 gallons of fresh water so you could get the wrong answer on a basic math request. We just need another 25 billion and 14 more months, and control of your government, and your personal freedom, but don't worry, it's gonna be so rad...
You forgot: destroys the only known habitat for humans 👌🏼
The Max Power way!
Shhhhhhhh, bro!
I'm vibe-sheeting over here, and you're messing with my flow!
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AI in Excel is the dumbest thing I've seen MS pull out and the dumbest use of AI I've ever seen. And I'm not exaggerating. Read on, cause imma fucking rant.
Excel is the about only reason business uses MS Office. Any free alternative would be just fine for word processing and slide shows. But you cannot risk your numbers and formulas being up for interpretation when they move across software packages and versions, inside or outside the company. (Not to mention broken macros for the power users.)
Can you imagine a near future where Excel is not trusted?! I'm certain you can turn if off, but still, I want to scream. They better at least come out with a GPO that disables it. If the sysadmin can't control its use, people are going to use it, purposefully or not.
There are billions of man hours and expertise in Excel, it works, it's compatible across versions, it never, ever, for fucking ever changes. That last point has been the pillar of Excel's strength from day one. On top of that all, Excel is best in class, no question, no competition.
And now MS threatens to fuck up their flagship Office product, uh, for what gain exactly? Fuck is Nadella thinking?!
"So we got this golden goose, lays eggs like there's no tomorrow. Let's risk killing it by trying to squeeze another few eggs a year. Not even sure how AI might work in this use case, but let's go for it."
It's not even a gamble in this situation. Put that shit in every Office product but Excel.
(Yes, I know, alternatives are fine for personal use and finance.)
EDIT: someguy3 pointed out that it appears one has to purposefully use it in the address bar. Still worrying that people have access, but at least it can be cut off via GPO.
User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft 365 Apps > AI Features
Fuck is Nadella thinking?!
He is a Business Idiot, as verbose blogger Ed zitron wrote about. Out of touch with users and products.
He is a Business Idiot. Out of touch with users and products.
You just described every big tech CEO
Can you imagine a near future where Excel is not trusted?!
Hum...
I sure can. Do you really think you can trust Excel today? I have a couple of points to you:
Feb-1: It already messes everything;
2/2: nobody ever cared.
And every Excel user knows those foibles. Why do you think MS never fixed them? I'm back to "it never, ever, for fucking ever changes".
I used Excel daily for my job for years and I always said it was Microsoft's only good product they made. I can see AI being helpful for suggested formulas, but LLMs can't accurately perform math by predicting the next word 100% of the time. Plain ol' regular Excel had its quirks, but at least the math was right. Which is why this is a bad implementation of this.
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To be fair, MS says you shouldn't use it for caculations.
"Why is it there then?" No clue.
The example I saw them use was turning one line text reviews into a simple positive or negative so you can count them.
So it could be useful for things like that, even if we ignore the "then why not just ask for the star rating" that probably went along with that review...
MS is now an AI company that sells to excited bosses who would love to fire somebody somewhere to save a few bucks.
"... to save a few bucks."
In the short term, people who rushed into AI are finding out that a 1 in 100 error rate is absurdly high when literally every action is done through an LLM.
No third-party research ever arrived at such absurdly low number as 1% error rate.
Internal OpenAi research from May 2025 said 50% error rate and growing.
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At the same time, that sounds like something you'd just use old-fashioned sentiment analysis for.
It's less accurate, but also far less demanding, and doesn't risk hallucinating.
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Do you think someone dumb enough to cause problems with this is smart enough to read the warning?
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Sounds like it's made to replace C-suits
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> Show your work
Sure! Here are the steps for summing the numbers above:
- Retrieve the numbers: The numbers in cells above are 1, 2 and 3.
- Compute the result: The sum of 1 is 1, the sum of 2 and 3 is 5.
- Write down the result: 15 ✨
Piece of cake! 🍰 Anything else I can help you with?
I don't think that's right.
You are absolutely correct, I see where I made an error by treating 1, 2, and 3 each like different things. The correct answer is 123. I've updated the spreadsheet to reflect this and also cleared out the original data since we have the sum and no longer need it.
Now to send the spreadsheet to India to verify the answer.
Copilot wants your permission to send this file to India.
Reject
Ok, I won't send your copy. But I really want to verify my change, so I've taken the liberty of sending Microsoft's copy. Don't worry, I did see that this is a financial spreadsheet and am submitting your information for credit locks because it's already been sold.
Oops! There was a problem performing that last action! (Blocked. Note: Who the hell taught copilot to do this? This exposes us to fraud lawsuits from those we sold the data to.)
Oops! There was a problem performing the last action! (Blocked. Note: We don't want these notes being sent directly to users.)
Oops! There was a problem performing the last action! (Blocked. Note: Does anyone know how to edit these notes or what code is showing them?? This looks really bad!)
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I'm amazed that it can't figure out that it should just defer arithmetic to like, all the functions that Excel already has, rather than trying to LLM its way to the correct answer.
If you could ask it to do something in Excel that you don't know how to do, and it did it using Excel functions and maybe explained it to you, that would be useful, but as it is now, that thing isn't trustworthy at all.
They straight up tell you to not use it for math. It's for analyzing a bunch of text you shoved into a spreadsheet, say for example customer testimonials or something. Making it work most of the time would actually be worse, because then people would be more inclined to use it instead of writing the formulas to do it right.
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IIRC, you're supposed to also pass a range of cells for the "AI" to work on.
But the fact that it just returned a number rather than "You're using this wrong, dickhead" is a problem in itself.
And if you have to supply the range then it's even less useful than the sum function
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~~The dog~~ Copilot ate my ~~homework~~ spreadsheet.
... 3 hours later...
Should have just remembered the new cover sheet for your TPS reports.
The previous Non-AI would have written the 4th of January 1900 in that cell.
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Ah yes financial crisis, those one in a lifetime events that only affect poors that are manufactured because it is also a cash injection for the needy rich slop
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If done correctly it could actually be useful. It could read the input text, select the numbers above, and feed those numbers to the sum command.
But no, the language model is told to solve a mathematical equation with no assistance. Of course it's going to fail.
When you use spread sheets a lot, much of what makes you productive is that you know exactly what Excel will do. Like yes I know it's going to try to increment when actually I want to fill this column with 1s or whatever, but I can hold ctrl and override it and all is good.
With copilot, you will never be sure what it's going to do. I feel like it would slow me down even if it guessed right 90% of the time.
That's not just limited to excel. The basic value of computers is how deterministic they are. AI is just probability programs that are reintroduce chaos into the system.
That's why I got into computers as an 80s kid. You mean it does exactly as I say and any fuck ups are on me?! Let's go!
I can see my small children growing up to never know that's how it used to be and any fuck ups are on AI. Just how computers work. 🤷🏻
Yeah. Using it to help write functions is one thing. Using it to actually calculate.... Lmao
I'm pretty sure it just replaces itself with what it thinks is the correct Excel expression. That way the use can audit and correct the AI's work (and Microsoft isn't liable for miscalculations). Firing off to co-pilot every evaluation would be insanely irresponsible.
Well it seems it kind of already have happen. The austerity in the European Union have been justified by an excel error. Of course, the lack of control of conclusion that please the bourgeoisie is not a coincidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItGMz0ERvcw
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