Our very own economic Butlerian jihad.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Such a complicated way just to add more RAND() to formulas.
OK, I'm not really mad at this. I already used Copilot to design a table for me in Excel and it worked really well. It did everything for me, and I just had to copy-paste the formulas into their appropriate spots. If it's built-in, possibly will work better.
Not everybody needs to be an Excel expert, after all. Having that functionality might be actually beneficial.
yes okay dad
Any time, nutsack.
Why would anyone use an LLM as calculator?
That just doesn't make sense.
It is like using a calculator as typewriter because it can spell 80085.
To waste electric energy. All those power plants produce immense amounts of energy that needs to be consumed. If we didn't have LLMs, the pollution of those plants would be for nothing. At least now, there is an attempt to put it in good use.
Well, there is a use case.
I don't know much about statistics. I can (i assume) as the ai questions in natural language that I would otherwise have to research how to calculate.
Of course, I may get a result, but I won't be any smarter. If that was the goal, then great.
So what you are saying is, my car is a typewriter?
Microsoft might agree with this.
I did this with my car when I got to that point and sent it to my girlfriend, but I photoshopped it so it said I was going over 100. Anyway I thought it was funny.
I was in the car with my missus, every 2 seconds she was making sure I hadn't missed the big moment. She's a good egg.
Keep her!
Heh heh 80085
High brow humour indeed
There are things that could be done to improve Excel. For instance, fully integrate python and allow it to be used to create custom functions. Then, maybe one day, VBA can ride off into the sunset where it belongs.
Adding Copilot to Excel is not an improvement because Copilot and all other LLM based platforms frequently barfs out totally incorrect information about how to do something in Excel.
"You do that using formula."
No, I can't, you worthless pile of shit because THAT FORMULA DOESNT EXIST.
Integrated python scripts in excel sounds like a malware developers dream.
I mean... Yeah, but the same can be said for VB?
Yeah, but lots more tooling and libraries for Python. Its just one more attack surface 🤷
Especially since VBA can make calls to the Windows API directly and through that avenue do all kinds of funky things to your system.
Surely there’s some sort of sandboxing that could be done? Like start by disallowing sys calls entirely
Definitely, but sandboxes can be escaped, and you can't protect everything via sandbox. Apparently its all cloud anyway, but if it were local and sandboxed, there are still exploits like rowhammer and spectre that may cause further risks.
Its taken years to get browser sandboxes to where they are, and even they get broken every so often.
And a nightmare for an application developer told to make some app with a spreadsheet for a database scale
Could result in some very cursed codebases.
"We dont use git, we just update the excel spreadsheet"
I've worked at places where they did that anyway lol
That's just called Access
Is that creepy thing still alive?
They foresaw that. That's because python on Excel doesn't run locally, but in the cloud and then returns the result to you: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introduction-to-python-in-excel-55643c2e-ff56-4168-b1ce-9428c8308545
That's the worst possible solution to that problem. Why can't they just develop their own script that's Turing complete but doesn't have any system calls?
Or just use Lua compiled without the system calls. This is done by many video games. İt's 2025, there is no need to create new domain specific languages.
Or use embedded Lisp, like all the cool kids.
That's even worse!
Still sounds like you'd be shipping your data to the cloud, where it can be exfilled from there.
Would potentially be a great phishing tool, just need to trick someone into putting sensitive data into a precooked excel file, and it gets exfilled.
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