I don’t know, I’m not that deep in Excel lore. But sometimes things change.

That sounds like a different thing than =COPILOT (). There are like 75 completely different things all called Copilot, because Microsoft are masters at naming things.

You can certainly use AI to generate the function and paste it in, but that is not what =COPILOT() is for. You could just have any other LLM do that.

I genuinely cannot think of a single use-case where you would want Excel to look at your entire spreadsheet without it being a horrible mistake. You definitely do not want AI to do math for you, and that is thankfully not what this thing is designed for.

Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you’re working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.

That is true for a lot of things, particularly every AI feature ever.

It’s a lot simpler than that. =COPILOT() can only see cells provided in the second parameter, and the user didn’t provide one. It’s just giving you what a typical answer to “compute the sum of the numbers above” is.

No, it’s a lot more basic than that. You provide =COPILOT() the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn’t provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.

People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.

There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.

It didn’t consider any of the numbers, because the user didn’t provide the context argument to the function.

It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for =COPILOT() says a few things which are relevant to understand what we’re seeing here:

• You’re not supposed to use it for math
• It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument

In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they’re just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request “sum the numbers above”. And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.

Just one caveat, you have to move to a place where the rent is $2000 a month.

Oh, you definitely wonder how long you can keep up with the corpo bullshit, but that wasn’t the vibe I was getting from the first panel. That was giving me more of a “junior engineer who can’t get something to work” vibe.

I’ve traded half my pay for more fulfilling work and less corpo bullshit before, but I didn’t quit engineering. I see some people dreaming about leaving it all behind and buying a farm, but what they all had in common was zero farming experience. The grass is always greener and all that.

I’ve never hired a software consultant, but most of the time when I hire a company or person to do contract work like roofing, gardening or similar they prefer to be paid by check. Sometimes they accept credit cards, but usually not when the bill is over a certain amount, due to the cut going to the card company.

Furthermore, “Direct Deposit” is basically a special term used for people getting their wages or salary paid to their bank account, as opposed to receiving it by check or cash. Other types of bank-to-bank transfers have different names, like “wire transfer” or “ACH transfer”.

Americans love overcomplicating things in general, and particularly love using overly specific and technical names for stuff. There’s acronyms everywhere, and things are named after weird technicalities. Like nobody says “retirement account”, they call it “401(k)”, named after the paragraph in the law which defines it.

You find stuff like that everywhere if you look. Some of their coins don’t even have a value printed on them, you just have to memorize how much they’re worth.

I know, and I mentioned that in another thread. The first panel in the comic was giving junior engineer vibes, though.

Contract work is rarely direct deposit, though?

That’s not that outrageous as a higher-level IC in a big tech company in a big city. But if you’re that senior you’re not questioning why you became an engineer.

It doesn’t say it’s salary. A lot of companies pay out bonuses right around now.

Charcoal, probably.

Yeah, that’s why they did it.