Chatgpt for Excel is still an office add-in running in the same sandbox though. strongpigeon described the exact bottleneck upthread, process boundary crossings, context.sync() roundtrips that take seconds on web. That's a platform limitation, not a model limitation. Swapping AI behind the add-in doesn't fix the fundamental constraint that third-party add-ins can't deeply integrate with Excel's runtime the way a native feature can. If copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-in with less access is likely not be better.

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angadsg 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Would love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel. Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT for Excel does really well on complex sheets.

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com2kid 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is an irony here that this would be more performant with a 2002 coding model. A native plugin, COM, OLE, whatever. C++, crash prone, but fast.

	▲	strongpigeon 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency. That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.

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phyalow an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Try writing your own comments rather than posting AI slop