• Pyr@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    … You aren’t supposed to use it for math… In excel? What is the point?

    • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      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.

      • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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        11 hours ago

        But haven’t the makers of Excel said in the past that you shouldn’t use Excel for non-math stuff because that’s not what it’s designed for? Now their putting in a “tool” that’s useless for math stuff?

        • Danquebec@sh.itjust.works
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          10 hours ago

          Is there a layperson-accessible way to paste a large number of email adresses and concatenate them with "; " that’s more recommended than spreadsheet software?.

      • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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        18 hours ago

        True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn’t figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it’s result though