[LuxBennu]

Chatgpt for Excel is still an office add-in running in the same sandbox though. strongpigeon described the exact bottleneck upthread, process boundary crossings, context.sync() roundtrips that take seconds on web. That's a platform limitation, not a model limitation. Swapping AI behind the add-in doesn't fix the fundamental constraint that third-party add-ins can't deeply integrate with Excel's runtime the way a native feature can. If copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-in with less access is likely not be better.

[angadsg]

Would love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel. Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT for Excel does really well on complex sheets.

[com2kid]

There is an irony here that this would be more performant with a 2002 coding model. A native plugin, COM, OLE, whatever. C++, crash prone, but fast.

[strongpigeon]

Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency.

That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.