Thumbs up the bad and the good, with about 10% thumbs down randomly. Poison their data set.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Top comment from the last time this was posted pointed out how the image is cropped on the left. We are most definitely looking at rows 11-14 and there are numbers above that are not being shown.
I just want them to remove the god awful copilot button that showed up in the corner on top of cells in my spreadsheet with no way to move or hide it. It’s not even on the ribbon anymore where I can ignore it. Fuckin’ pricks.
It's a lot simpler than that. =COPILOT() can only see cells provided in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide one. It's just giving you what a typical answer to "compute the sum of the numbers above" is.
How is this easier than just typing in sum(a1:a3)??
The point is not just to make typing easy, it's also to lower the skill barrier
It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for =COPILOT() says a few things which are relevant to understand what we're seeing here:
- You're not supposed to use it for math
- It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument
In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they're just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request "sum the numbers above". And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
.... You aren't supposed to use it for math.... In excel? What is the point?
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.
Keep in mind that if you allow a user to make this mistake, people will DEFINITELY make this mistake. A lot.
That is true for a lot of things, particularly every AI feature ever.
And if that's true, just imagine something any more compex, that could get lost amid the rest of the slop for a long time
Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.
Every job is just some sort of troubleshooting, it just makes it harder to do when your manual is making stuff up
It obviously added "A+1+2+3" and got 15 after looking up the typical value of A.
Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71...
Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it's just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn't think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense... Wait holy shit... I got it
2+3 = 5
1 = 1
Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) "1"+(str) "5" = "15"
It didn't consider any of the numbers, because the user didn't provide the context argument to the function.
I'm betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can't confirm as I don't use excel but that seems to be the issue.
No, it's a lot more basic than that. You provide =COPILOT() the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.
Wait... Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can't see the data in excel? That's insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don't see why excel wouldn't be able to...
Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you're working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.
Wow, yeah most people who want to use a function like this will mess that up...
Or A can be 10 in hexadecimal, but that wouldn't fit either.
Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I'm betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.
How many gigawatts did it take for you to figure that out?
1.21 jiggawatts!
And it was still wrong
The typical value of A is 9, according to copilot.
Off by 1. Not too bad.
Whenever I’m feeling suicidal, I remind myself that I have never had to use Excel
It doesn’t always work, but it often works
Edit: although, I did have a brief affair with Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes, back in the day