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.