Excel's =COPILOT | Hacker News Reader

Excel's =COPILOT

techcommunity.microsoft.com

13 pointspykello8 comments

I wonder if Microsoft tainting their core products with AI will end up backfiring from people no longer trusting their software.

Excel spreadsheets might end up having errors from people (mis)using =COPILOT formulas, but this will never be a problem in other office suites. Hosting your project on GitHub might attract stupid pull requests from clueless people (mis)using the easy Copilot pull request functionality, but this will never be a problem on other forges.

Maybe the market will respond to this long-term?

Microsoft is so entrenched that they could start live broadcasting throwing puppies into a wood chipper with no significant change to market share. They're going to continue slowly bleeding customers at about the same rate for the next few decades, probably.

"Its output should be reviewed and validated for accuracy, especially for critical business decisions or reports."

And I'd do that by writing out the function in Excel? :)

Is it just me, but doesn’t it seem like a terrible idea to bake the COPILOT trademark into the name of an Excel function?

It could allow Microsoft to threaten to use trademark law against competitors who support the Excel file format.

It would also mean Microsoft would need to provide indefinite support for a function name that might not survive more than a few marketing cycles.

> Is it just me, but doesn’t it seem like a terrible idea to bake the COPILOT trademark into the name of an Excel function?

You're talking about a product which still to this day thinks it's an excellent idea to have formulas be translated, with no support for the English version in other languages. I switch my Excel to Norwegian and I have to use SUMMER not SUM, and opening any sheet with SUM will just fail to compute.

So yes, it's a terrible idea, but it's also an entirely normal Excel thing to do.

And not to forget just how bad Excel is with trying to interpret everything as a date, to the detriment of several fields of science, among other things.

Well I mean, it's a spreadsheet, if it's not a number then surely it's a date. Why else would you put something in a cell? /s

At work we have a lot of Excel sheets being sent from customers that are basically data dumps from databases. People export to CSV, open it in Excel (not import), and tada, very convenient. Except now those numerical article numbers are missing all the leading zeros, half the weights are dates and so on...

It sure is one enticing hammer...

Yet another way to make horrific data errors in your mission critical spreadsheets.

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