Agents still can't automate Excel

clickety_clack•about 3 hours ago

Having seen some spreadsheets in my time, I can imagine what the training data is like.

satertek•about 2 hours ago

I've tried to 'reverse engineer' some of our excel sheets, and it's difficult to get the model to stop scolding me for using so many =INDIRECT statements.

MASNeo•about 3 hours ago

My agents can deal with Excel all right. What’s the story?

phailhaus•about 3 hours ago

The story is that the writer is Orcaset, which is trying to sell you their own analysis tools.

ekidd•about 2 hours ago

Yup. Their benchmark appears to consist of giving an agent XLSX files that use advanced Excel features, but no copy of Excel, and expecting the agents to interpret the spreadsheet the same way Excel would. So the agents try LibreOffice instead, and if that doesn't work, they try to write Python scripts. But the behavior of the Python doesn't match the behavior of Excel.

To put it politely, this seems like a self-inflicted problem. If you really want your agents to interpret advanced Excel features exactly the way Excel would, have you considered maybe giving your agents Excel?

danielrhodes•about 2 hours ago

False.

lbourdages•about 3 hours ago

I once tried using Gemini directly in Google Sheets to make a graph. I never managed to get it to do exactly what I wanted; after wasting way too much time on it I was able to fix the problem in a matter of seconds. It's fascinating because it is quite different from the situation in coding agents where they are in general really quick to read code and find issues/fixes.

peezd•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, it seems like such an easy value add (especially since they gate it on gemini subs) to make Gemini do a great job in the google productivity apps, but they are generally pretty awful.

Claude with MCP access to the google workplace APIs consistently does a better job with any manipulation of google docs

bharatsuthar•about 2 hours ago

Tried Gemini in Google sheets today and it was horrible. I simply asked it to apply a nice visual formatting (bold, header filling, currency signs etc) but it made everything look ugly despite working for 4-5 mins.

sidibe•about 1 hour ago

Yeah I don't know what's holding it back in the browser, doing stuff to sheets is fine from antigravity.

bensyverson•about 2 hours ago

The key is to have agents generate code which exports Excel with live formulae (there's a good Python library).

airstrike•about 2 hours ago

Building financial models in python will never work

The end user is not a software developer

rietta•about 3 hours ago

There are way worse choices to fall back on than LibreOffice. Heck, it's the primary tool I actually use in my business. I can tell you first hand that it does not handle all the random stuff that corporate Excel users come up with, but if you start with basic principles the files usually work great in the other direction.

thisisauserid•about 3 hours ago

Have your agent call DuckDB to load it first.

josefritzishere•about 3 hours ago

I didn't know that. Agents can't do today what I used VB for 20 years ago?

Agents still can't automate Excel

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