Web search within Excel

GPT for Excel allows you to access to fresh web search data and retrieve up-to-date information in bulk directly from Excel. This guide walks you through generating descriptions for a list of companies based on a web search and optimizing the results.

Step 1: Get started

Prerequisites

• You have installed GPT for Excel.
• You have opened a workbook containing text for the web search in a column.

Open the GPT for Excel add-in and run the Search the web bulk tool with the question Write one sentence to describe this company: on a few rows to see how it works.

If you find the answers satisfactory, launch your bulk web search. Otherwise, check how to improve your results in Step 2.

Step 2: Improve your results

If your results are not satisfactory (for example, information is inaccurate, incomplete, or not relevant to your needs), you can improve them with the following approaches:

Goal	Recommended approach
Improve result accuracy	Analyze the sources Use the Show sources option to understand where the information comes from and assess its reliability.
Refine search results	Narrow down the search Edit your question to provide more context. For example, provide the company website URL instead of providing a company name.
Ensure all URLs are processed	Check the URLs provided Check that all URLs are publicly accessible and not behind a login page. note Searching a specific page only works if: Perplexity's web crawler has already independently indexed the content of the page. The crawler does not index new pages on demand based on URLs you provide. In addition, the crawler respects robots.txt directives and does not index disallowed content. The URL points directly to the page without any redirects. To check if a URL results in redirects, use the Redirect Checker. If a specific URL does not produce valid results, use a different source of information.
Handle complex tasks	Break down complex tasks For multi-steps analysis, search the web to retrieve the information, then process the results with the most adapted bulk tool or GPT function. For example, you can use the Search the web bulk tool to generate a description for a company based on their website, then use the Classify bulk tool to define the company's industry based on the information retrieved.
Handle missing information	Provide a fallback plan Edit your question to specify what to do when the answer cannot be found. For example: If the company's website does not provide the information, say "Information not found". This prevents the bulk tool from returning irrelevant information.

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