I don’t see the problem. Sometimes it’ll be fifteen, and then it will be perfect every time. This saves the user literal hours of time poring over documentation and agonizing over which esoteric function to use, which far outweigh the few times this number will be nine.
F
Best give that a thumbs down. Bad vibes!
Stunned that they’re fucking with their flagship Office product. Without Excel, everyone could simply drop Office.
Been a sysadmin at small companies for 10 years, and that means I’m the one vetting and purchasing software. Last shop was all in on Google for Business and Google for auth. Worked pretty well, but accounting and HR still had to have Excel.
It’s not even so much that other software can’t do simple Excel tasks, it’s the risk of your numbers getting lost in translation. In any case, nothing holds a candle to the power of Excel. And now they want to fuck with it?!
Excel is often used by people that don’t know what a database is, and you end up with thousands of rows of denormalised data just waiting for typos or extra white spaces to fuck up the precarious stack of macros and formulae. Never mind the update/insert anomalies and data corruption waiting to strike.
I have a passionate hate for Excel, but I understand that not everyone is willing to learn more robust data processing
It’s probably because Access fucking sucks, leaving excel as the only database adjacent program available to office workers. I would love to be able to use anything but excel on my projects. Hell, python and some CSVs would make my life so much easier, but I ain’t going through IT to let me have that, and it opens up a HUGE can of worms in my line of work if I start using homemade scripts. The execs can pay for a LIMS system if they want me more productive.
The precarious stack of macros and formulae that you also can’t version control properly because it’s a superficially-XML-ified memory dump, not textual source code.
Almost every nontrivial use of Excel would be better off as, if not a database, at least something like a Jupyter notebook with pandas.
I do bioanalysis without a sample management system. I recently had a 1000+ sample project with 6 analytes, all samples needing a few reanalyses due to everything in this whole project being complete shit.
I spent probably three weeks of time just tracking samples to figure out what needed what analysis through excel. It’s so painful knowing that a proper python script could do it in a few seconds.
What’s stopping you from using a proper python script?
Ed Zitron wrote an article a while ago about Business Idiots. From what I recall, the people in charge of these big companies are out of touch with users and the product, and so they make nonsense decisions. Companies aren’t run by the best and brightest. They’re run by people who do best in that environment.
Microsoft seems to be full of business idiots.
WheresYourEd.At/the-era-of-the-business-idiot
So funny
To be clear, I am deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way, but if he does, Microsoft’s board should fire him immediately.
Ed was just on an Ars Technica livestream 👌 (not posted [yet])
probably sales, if it’s purchase it shows -15
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not shown: row 5 - “January 25th”
I’m so happy to know world will crumble by LLM corpo bullshit rather than climate change. It looks MUCH more fun.
Clammy Sam: We need to build even bigger LLMs to fix the errors of our current LLMs
Simple, 3+2 = 5. Add 1, which came before the 3 and 2, and you get 1 then 5, 15. It’s new new math, or as I will henceforth call it, mAIth.
New-hoo-hoo math
It’s so simple, so very simple
That only an AI can do it
Damn it now this is going to be stuck in my head for the day. “64. How did 64 get into it? I hear you cry.”
Tom Lehrer?
One of the principal justifications for George Osborne’s 2010 austerity plans turned out to be erroneous thanks to an Excel error.
That was without any help from AI, things could be about to get much worse.
Silly copilot. Everyone knows the answer is 10 because A+1+2+3 = 10.
Nah A+1+2+3=65+49+50+51 so the answer is 215.
Ok I see what happened here. You said the numbers “above” and it saw A in the column name. In hexadecimal that’s a 10. But you also said “numbers” plural, and “1” isn’t plural. So it took A + 2 + 3 = 15.
Makes perfect sense, maybe just write better prompts next time. /s
I doubt it. The column name isn’t part of the data.
However “the numbers above” is data.
3 letters + 7 letters + 5 letters= 15 letters.
Thank you for that. I have the prompt discussion with a friend all the time.
Doesn’t even need the /s. That is largely how those glorified search engines work.
No it isn’t. The above is using logic, however bad it may be. LLMs are not. It’s just a statistical model. It doesn’t think.
Woah woah woah, stop it right there. I won’t stand for slander against actual search engines!
on the one hand, obviously this is not the way you should be using that function. On the other hand, I’m not sure how you even should.
I don’t think Microsoft even knows how you should
1+2+3+AI
Like that LinkedIn lunatic, E = mc^2 + AI
