supposedly
https://twitter.com/tsrandall/status/1600257537974341632
So, let us look at what he’s claiming.
ChatGPT saved me an hour of spreadsheet work today. It wrote a complex sorting script beyond my ability, explained how it works, and helped me deploy it.
The party tricks have been fun, but this was a whoa moment for me similar to the first time I used Google Search.
Some are asking if I could share the prompt that I used. But that’s just it—I’m not an expert in Excel and it wasn’t a single well-written prompt. It was more like a long chat with an Excel expert who was eager to help.
I think I started with something like “Help me write a script in Google Sheets.” Then just started describing the data and everything I wanted it to do. When something didn’t work, I’d feed the whole code back to it and ask what changes I need to make in order to do X.
I asked for rows within a range to be sorted based on values in several columns in order of priority. When certain conditions are met, values in a range are summed and added to another sheet. There’s a timestamp for new data. That sort of thing. It’s best to work in chunks.
Some issues came up, and I’d just post the error code or describe how it wasn’t doing what I expected and ask for some potential reasons why it wasn’t working. That was very effective—it would give me a clear list of possible problems, and often it was number 3 or 4.
Sorry I can’t be more specific—it’s trial and error. The key is ChatGPT’s natural language abilities. Just have a conversation like you would with a colleague on Slack—no need for a perfect prompt.
I’ve had some VBA macros stop working after recent Office updates.
Maybe I’ll see if ChatGPT can rewrite them for me. Or come up with a better solution.
