Original post: social.coop (Mastodon)
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Looks like it's just producing random numbers. If you remove 'the' and only say 'sum numbers above', it'll result in 10. You can also do the same with no numbers anywhere in the sheet and the result will still be 15 and 10.
You can even tell it to 'sum the numbers from A1, A2, A3' and it'll yet again produce 15. As per the documentation, you should give it specific cells as context, e.g., 'COPILOT("sum the numbers", A1:A3)'. I can confirm this works, though I'm not sure why as the prompt sent to the model should be the exact same.
Definitely more convenient than =SUM(A1:A3)
No kidding. If I have to tell the stupid model what I'm talking about explicitly with a cell range, I might as well write the function myself. And if I'm an excel novice who doesn't know SUM(), then I should go learn about it to solve my problem instead of offloading to a model whose result I can't verify.
LLMs are not a replacement for knowledge and skill. It's a tool that might, might be able to accelerate things you already could do.
That said... can copilot do conditional formatting? "Highlight in red all rows where cell 5 is No" would actually be useful. Conditional formatting rules are madness.
I just really looked at the image. =COPILOT() is absolutely insane... Does that make a call to microsoft from this sheet every time it's opened? when the related cells change? when anything changes? If your document is 'financial forecast fy 2026', have you just given the whole doc as context to another company? sure, sure, sure, they said they wouldn't look at your stuff, but prove it.
From 10 to 33 keystrokes, what an improvement.
Without specifying cells it might be pulling numbers in it's system prompt instead