ChatGPT for Excel - what they're NOT telling you!

everyone's talking about how great chat GPT is and how it'll increase your productivity in Excel by X percent but no one's talking about what it's bad at and the dangers you should watch out for so far I've found that using chat GPT for Excel can be hit and miss and often it's more missed than hit in this tutorial I'll show you the best uses for chat GPT to make your Excel life easier and what you should avoid and be wary of so you don't get caught out because it can be very easy to believe that what it tells you is true let me show you the results I got with chat gpt3 beginners will probably get the most out of chat GPT because it's good at answering simple questions for intermediate to Advanced Excel users it becomes less useful because it struggles with complex questions it's easy enough to ask a question simply type it in the box at the bottom of the chat GPT screen it stores your questions and answers in the pane on the left so you can refer back to them here I asked it to explain how the ax lookup function works and it does a pretty good job as we can see it provides an overview of what the function does followed by the syntax and then an explanation of each argument if it doesn't give you an adequate answer you can click the regenerate response button to get it to try again now in this answer it stops short of an example so I asked it a follow-up question can you give me an example and it gave me a fairly simple example but there's a lot more to X lookup not covered here and without knowing what it's capable of you wouldn't know to ask if you have a fairly straightforward formula question it can usually give you a solution we get a lot of questions about if formulas like this one left in the comments on our blog and I literally copied and pasted it into chat GPT and it returned the correct answer we can see chat GPT is great at giving you instant answers to simple questions and this is going to save Excel beginners a lot of time but it comes at a cost you're not learning if you just ask chat GPT to do the work for you I hope my teenage sons are watching this therefore I recommend you try to find a solution yourself and then if you get an error a better question to ask is what's wrong with my formula it should be doing XYZ this way chat GPT will not only fix the formula it'll explain where you went wrong and what the correct solution should be let's take a look let's say you're trying to write a formula but it's returning an error you can simply ask it what's wrong with the formula now the first time I asked this question it got it wrong here you can see it's added two extra Arguments for table one and year which simply aren't required so I asked it to regenerate the response if I click on the toggle here we can see the second time it answered it correctly not only that it told me what the problem was and it explained the change also keep in mind that it doesn't know what data you're working with so if the formula is returning a result but not the One You're Expecting then chat GPT probably won't be able to help with that if you've inherited an Excel file with a complex formula chat GPT is pretty good at explaining what that formula does in layman's terms we can see here a super complex nestative formula and it does a decent job at explaining what it's doing at a high level but without knowing what the cells in the spreadsheet contain it doesn't have all of the information required to give a completely detailed answer I asked if it can simplify the formula and it said it could and it gave me some pointers but it avoided actually doing it in hindsight I should have been more explicit with my question and asked it to simplify it and that's what I tried next now it gave me an answer and if we scroll across you can see it's not nearly as big as the original formula but it Returns the wrong result by a factor of nearly six it also includes three pairs of parentheses that simply aren't required so from this we can see that it's knowledge of excel functions isn't as advanced as it appears well yet anyway similar to Excel formula questions it's also okay at simple power query formula questions for example I asked it how do you round to the nearest 0.5 in power query it got confused at first and it gave me a formula containing Excel functions just in lower case like power query functions are written and when I try to in Excel it also returned the wrong answer so strike one there I told it that round isn't a power query function and it politely apologized and then it gave me the correct answer of course as a beginner you need to know what to do with this code and while you can ask chat GPT where to put the code it's unlikely to give you the answer you actually need for example I only wanted the formula to use in a custom column so I only need this part of it the rest is redundant chat GPT did better with the powerpivot Dax question I asked it I found a question on our Excel forum and copied and pasted it word forward to see how chat GPT would fare and I'm pleased to say it did quite well and it even wrote the formula using the table and column names that were mentioned in the question however I suspect that like Excel and power query formulas as the questions get more complex the answers will get less reliable chat GPT also did quite well with the VBA question I found on our Forum which asked how do I change this VBA code so that it sends from an Outlook template file a DOT oft rather than a blanket email again I copied and pasted the question and the code in and it returned an almost identical answer to one of our experienced VBA Forum moderators so I was pretty impressed with that however I know it doesn't always get it right so don't count on it being able to automate everything you do I really want to love chat GPT and I do for some things but there are some things you should never use it for well at least not with the current version which is chat gpt3 first don't get it to do math or check math results it'll give you an answer and it will assure you it's correct but unless the result is two digits or smaller it's unlikely to get it right and even then it mightn't I was horrified at the math results it returned it clearly doesn't have a calculator built into its logic which I'd have thought is pretty simple to do I mean even my Google smart Speaker gets the correct answers let's take a look the first question is so far off it's ridiculous and when I question the answer it doubled down 392 is miles away it's not even close to approximate and this is what I mean by it being easy to believe what it's telling you because it comes across so authoritative I gave it some easier questions but anything that returned an answer with decimals it got wrong that's not to say if your answer is whole numbers it'll get it right I simply wouldn't use it for math questions until it has a calculator built in it's disappointing that Microsoft didn't prevent it from doing math for the time being if you give it a leading question it will follow for example I asked Excel has a function called between correct and it agreed with me now if we go and have a look in Excel and I type in equals between you can see there is no function called between there's run between it's completely different if we go back to chat GPT you can see that it's given me an answer it's even gone as far as telling me what the arguments are and it's therefore important to phrase your questions in a neutral way to ensure that you don't get a biased result that said even when I started a new question that was unbiased it still came back and told me there was a between function and laid out the syntax which is completely fictional now it may be influenced by my previous question because I'm in the same session I'm logged in as myself so it may remember other conversations I'm not quite sure but just be aware that if you ask it a leading question you're more likely to get a biased answer the bottom line is chat jpt is a bit like a politician you have to fact check everything it tells you some of it will be right some of it will be embellished and some of it will be plain wrong look I'm sure with each iteration of chat GPT and other large language models will see improvements on the limitations I've covered here and let's hope improvements in math capabilities arrive soon I hope you found this tutorial useful have fun with chat GPT But be sure to check the answers it gives you very carefully and don't use it for math you can click the link here to see the written tutorial which contains the screenshots of the questions and answers I covered and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more and why not share it with your friends who might also find it useful thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: MyOnlineTrainingHub

Views: 24,021

Keywords: excel, chatgpt

Id: 89gMzq98LPs

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023