How to Use AI in Excel
Tired of copy/pasting back and forth to a separate chat interface like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, or Claude? Bring the AI directly into your Excel spreadsheets!
Why use AI in Excel
Using AI in Excel allows you to leverage Excel's huge (1 million rows, 16 thousand columns) powerful grid to prompt AI in bulk efficiently on many cells at once and get your results neatly organized in rows and columns.
AI in Excel will greatly accelerate time-consuming grunt work such as cleaning a large merchandising catalog for e-commerce, writing SEO copy for all your products, doing market research over hundreds of companies or analyzing thousands of customer reviews or survey answers. What would've taken years will now take hours.
What is more, when your AI outputs are in Excel, you can easily apply native Excel features such as formulas, conditional formatting, filtering, charts and pivot tables to that data, to push your analysis to the end.
Which AI you can use in Excel
With the GPT for Excel Word add-in for Microsoft Office, you can use all the best generative pre-trained transformer AIs, from cloud providers such as OpenAI, Perplexity, xAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Gemini, Mistral, but also local servers such as Ollama or LM Studio to run open-source models such as Qwen or Llama.
Here are some advantages of each of them as of March 9th, 2025:
- OpenAI is the most reliable at scale, with great easy-to-use workhorse models (gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini) as well as reasoning models (o3-mini)
- Perplexity is the only provider which offers models connected to the web (the Sonar model series), which are very useful to conduct research that requires recent and up-to-date information
- Anthropic-s Claude Sonnet is a really good model for copywriting
- Gemini 2.0 Flash is really fast
- Deepseek models are extremely cheap and powerful, but beware that it is based in China.
- Using Ollama and LM Studio to run open-source models locally is best for privacy-conscious users who cannot send any data to cloud AI providers.
How to get started using AI in Excel
Here's a simple guide to integrating AI into your Excel workflow:
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Install the AI add-in
Begin by installing an AI-powered Excel add-in. For example, GPT for Excel is a powerful tool that allows seamless integration with Excel, bringing AI capabilities directly to your spreadsheets. Visit the GPT for Excel Word page in the Microsoft Office Store, click 'Open in Excel', and follow the installation instructions.
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Launch the AI add-in
Once installed, open Excel and click on the AI-powered tool (like GPT for Excel), which opens a sidebar where you can enter prompts or use bulk tools for AI tasks.
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Use AI for your bulk operations
You can now use AI for a range of tasks such as text generation or edition, translation, categorization, entity extraction, reformatting, or summarization. With AI capabilities, you can even analyze and interpret images or search the web, all directly within your familiar Excel environment.
Real-world use cases for AI in Excel
With AI in Excel, you combine automation and intelligence to process data, generate insights, and create dynamic dashboards in a fraction of the time. The following use cases represent just a few examples of how AI can supercharge your Excel workflow, with translation, feedback analysis and topic extraction.
Translate from multiple languages in bulk
Translate text in multiple cells at once. AI populates a new column with the translated text.
For example, have GPT for Excel translate customer reviews from various languages into English for easier analysis. For greater accuracy, you can add translation instructions and a glossary, just as you would for human translators.
GPT for Excel's Translate tool acts as a multilingual AI translator, available 24/7, delivering translations in seconds!
📺 Watch our video to see GPT for Excel's Translate tool in action!
Analyze customer feedback
Use AI to review feedback quickly in Excel. It spots key words and sentiment. Then, build a pivot table or chart to show trends clearly.
For example, have GPT for Excel analyze the sentiments expressed in your customer reviews. Choose the right granularity for your analysis and run the Classify tool on many cells.
Your pivot table and chart are automatically updated, giving you a quick overview of your customers' sentiment.
📺 Watch our video to see this sentiment analysis in action!
Extract key topics
Use the GPT for Excel Extract tool to let AI analyze customer reviews and extract key topics such as product quality, customer service, or value for money.
Excel charts help visualize the prevalence of each element and identify trends in customer feedback.
Pivot tables and charts can also be used to display the frequency and sentiment associated with each topic.
📺 Watch our video to see topic extraction in action!
🔗 Download the Excel workbook used in this article to try it yourself.
Other common use cases
GPT for Excel can also assist you in:
- Preparing, enriching, and segmenting unstructured data efficiently:
- Conducting market research:
- Performing bulk reviews for quality checks, scoring, or revisions:
- Generating or rewriting content at scale (e.g., listings, ads, social media posts):