Although using Excel spreadsheets together with Generative AI is not the first combination that people think of. Nevertheless, it is an extremely powerful combination that saves tons of time in the workplace.
Let’s face it, many knowledge workers spend a tremendous amount of time in Excel. Leveraging Generative AI to get higher quality results and lots of time savings is extremely appealing.
Here we list 5 use cases that we have come across with Structize AI:
1. Automated Data Entry and Extraction: AI can automate the process of extracting data from various sources (such as emails, PDFs, or just other Excel files) and entering it into an Excel spreadsheet. This is particularly useful in data-intensive environments where timely and accurate data entry is crucial.
Examples: receiving order forms, signed contracts, purchase orders or just simply updating a pricing list and processing these further downstream.
2. Data Cleaning and Preparation: Generative AI can automate the process of cleaning and preparing data within Excel. This includes filling missing values, correcting errors, and standardizing formats. AI can generate scripts or use Excel formulas to identify and fix anomalies, making the data ready for further analysis or reporting.
Examples: lead list data cleaning, sensor data structuring and many, many more.
3. High Quality translations: Many software tools provide the possibility to extract words, sentences, paragraphs and associated meta-data in an excel file. Think for instance of translations of your website, web-app or comments in a community. By using AI directly in excel to translate all the entries in different languages, a lot of time can be saved while still keeping a good overview on the structure of the original content.
Examples: translations of User Interfaces (UIs) of software, website translations, community translations.
4. Custom Report Generation: Excel users can utilize AI to automatically generate customized reports based on data within spreadsheets or documents. This includes summarizing key metrics, creating visualizations, and writing narrative summaries of data trends, which can be particularly useful for monthly business reviews or performance analysis.
Examples: Comparison between Investor Presentations or comparison between Annual Reports.
5. Formula creation: creating the right formulas in Excel can be time-consuming. Sometimes it is just easier to explain in plain text what your desired outcome should be for the next column you want to add to your table. This is one of the functionalities that Microsoft Co-Pilot tries to achieve in Excel. It saves lots of time, especially for those who are not Excel formula wizards, which, probably is true for the most of us.
Examples: check out Microsoft Co-Pilot for excel or other plugins available on the market.
Do you want to get started with Generative AI and Excel to save tremendous amount of time on a daily basis? Start here: