That mirrors my experience as well. LLMs get instantly confused in real world scenarios in Excel and confidently hallucinate millions in errors

If you look at the demos for these it’s always something that is clean and abundantly available in training data. Like an income statement. Or a textbook example DCF. Or my personal fav „here is some data show me insights“. Real world excel use looks nothing like that.

I’m getting some utility out of them for some corporate tasks but zilch in excel space.

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lxgr 19 hours ago | parent [-]

As somebody with non-existent experience with Excel, I could totally see myself getting a lot of value out of LLMs, if nothing else then simply for telling me what's possible, what functions and patterns exist at all etc.

	▲	Havoc 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah definitely has some value in that sense. That in itself isn't enough to make a dent in the work though. Think of it this way - an IDE can tell you what functions an object has or autocomplete something is useful to a beginner & learning. But that's not what puts food on the programmers table - writing code that solves real problems does. Same in excel business use cases - the numbers and formulas don't matter directly - their meaning in a business context does. And that connection can be very tenuous. With code the compiler is the ultimate arbiter - it has to make sense on that level. Excel files it's all freestyle - it could be anything from your grandmas shopping list to a model that runs half a bank.