I can't imagine anything more useless than a nondeterministic Excel function.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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WHAT ABOUT RAND()? CHECKMATE AI HATERS!!! (/s)
Randomness can still be deterministic and useful. Monte Carlo simulations and whatnot
That's the funny bit - unlike rand() which is purelly random with a uniform distribution - a feature which as you point out is useful - and is reliably so, copilot at best has a wild-ass distribution with an the extremelly high dimensionality of its shape which is not even reliable because every time it's initialization parameters are tweaked or any model weights change, the shape of that distribution changes.
It's like they were trying to come up with the thing that's the closest possible to mathematically useless.
But what if that is what casinos use to be random?
I read that some have cameras pointed at a wall of lava lamps, they combine random pixel data, with timestamps to the nanosecond, to generate random data.
What, you don't appreciate when your excel function just makes shit up? Weird ..
I realize this is the wrong community to post it in, but I can imagine it being useful for things like summarization and cursory sentiment analysis, and perhaps for chaotic test data generation.
As with all AI, though, it's a wildly risky tool as it requires the user to understand its limitations and fallibility (as well as the million other issues AI brings with it).
I feel like that boils down to "I want a chart, but in words instead of visualization."
I suppose the idea would be like AVG, but for free form text comment cells. Can't really chart that.
Of course it would be non deterministic left as a "formula", so it's still a bad idea to encode that way, but guess they could have a "summarize this column" feature and then the user does as they will with the result.
Though having comments in a column in a spreadsheet has always seemed like a weird format choice.
Kind of - it's the step that makes the data uniform and (nominally) useful so it can then be aggregated and reported on.
I can't imagine why they're taking this function out
Is this a real screen capture or are you having me on? Because did someone really ship this out????
NOO! IT BREAKS MY WORKFLOW!! /s
Don't worry, you can just replace it with a call to RAND() and scale it appropriately.
LibreOffice Calc glows harder
Turns out, "Math Program" didn't need a "Bullshit" button! Who knew?
Wonder whose was the excel sheet in which someone asked copilot to do some math and resulted in a few millions lost by "a honest mistake" of the artificial idiocy...
Microsoft is also unifying Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot into a single app as it simplifies how users access its AI tools across Microsoft 365.
Jesus is it really true that there are ~3 isolated teams working any mainline product at a given point? Using this stuff on iOS feels like it.
I think they may have some independent teams for the translations as well. Otherwise why the fuck would they translate function names?
They have been translating function names as far back as I can remember... Spreadsheets are meant for the general office worker who doesn't necessarily speak English
How expensive was this to run for them? I kind of wanted to test it since there is a few outputs which would’ve been cool to see it be generated.
But I can imagine a 200 row sheet with COPILOT() being slow and very expensive to have.
Oh well
And not even guaranteed to be accurate
There are some use cases where good enough works. Especially if your company doesn’t let you have access to code
There's "good enough" and then there's "it worked on my machine that one time but everytime someone else runs the function we get a different result"
God please let microsoft be the canary in the coalmine for an AI collapese
Add it to the list
I have added the list to the files that are deleted and have cleared the recycle bin.
What else can I do for you?
So when's OnlyOffice retiring its ridiculous "AI Mode" next?
Thank fuck. It might only have been a year, but it's felt like 10. I use Excel a lot for work and copilot is only detrimental to it.