Classification within Excel

GPT for Excel can help you classify your catalog items, press articles, or any other text into the most relevant category within Excel. This guide walks you through classifying a list of product names for a shoe store into categories, and improving your classification approach to get the best results.

Step 1: Get started

Prerequisites

• You have installed GPT for Excel.
• You have opened a workbook containing text to classify in a column.

Open the GPT for Excel add-in and run the Classify bulk tool with categories Casual Shoes, Dress Shoes, Athletic Shoes, Boots, Sandals, Sneakers on a few rows to see how it works.

If you find the answers satisfactory, go ahead and launch your bulk classification! Otherwise, check how to improve your results in Step 2.

Step 2: Improve your results

For best results, use gpt-4o, which offers higher accuracy. Also set Creativity and Top P settings to their minimum levels.

If your results are still not satisfactory (e.g., classification seems inaccurate, inconsistent, or too broad), you can further improve them by considering the following approaches.

Goal	Recommended approach
Classify according to specific rules	Add custom instructions Provide context or specific rules to follow. Classify flip flops as Casual shoes when their main material is leather.
Handle content outside categories	Add a fallback category Capture all irrelevant content into a fallback category and review it to refine your classification approach. For example, add Other to your list of categories. Casual Shoes, Dress Shoes, Athletic Shoes, Boots, Sandals, Sneakers, Other
Reduce use of 'Other' category	Make categories broader Make categories broader to ensure that all text is classified. For example, change Knee-high boots into Boots.
Balance categories	Refine categories Check that your categories are balanced. For example, if you have a category Summer shoes that is over-represented, you can split it into narrower categories. Sandals, Espadrilles, Flip-flops
Improve accuracy	Make categories mutually exclusive Check your category for overlaps. For example, Sandals and Summer Shoes are not mutually exclusive, so you should keep only one of them.
Classify into most specific category in a hierarchy	Use full paths to describe your hierarchy In a hierarchical system, use the full path of your most specific categories instead of providing a flat list of categories. Casual Shoes/Boat shoes, Casual Shoes/Sneakers, Dress Shoes/High heels/Stilettos, Dress shoes/High heels/Wedges
Define categories	Create a list of categories of a given type with the Extract bulk tool If you know the type of categories you want to classify your text into, but don't know all the categories in advance, extract all possible categories as entities with the Extract bulk tool. Then, classify the text based on this list. For example, to classify shoe descriptions by their main material, extract all the materials first, then classify the descriptions using the list of materials to identify the main material for each type of shoe.

Once you have refined your classification approch and are satisfied with the results from the initial rows, you are ready to launch your classification in bulk. Select more cells or even all cells, click Run rows, and watch GPT for Excel handle the rest of the classification.