Lesson 2 of 7

ChatGPT for Excel

6 min read

Your spreadsheet is open in one window and ChatGPT in another. It turns out the second window can do a surprising amount of the work in the first.

Paste the sheet, ask the question

ChatGPT can't see your spreadsheet on its own — but you can paste a chunk of it straight into the chat, or upload the file. Once it can read your rows and columns, you can ask for three very different kinds of help: write me a formula, clean up this messy data, or just explain what this sheet is doing.

ChatGPT works on your actual data, not just about spreadsheets in general — paste it in and the answers are about your rows.

Formulas, cleanup, and "explain this"

Each ask fixes a different pain. "Write a formula" turns a description into =... you can paste back. "Clean this up" fixes stray spaces, mixed date formats, and text that should be numbers. "Explain this sheet" reads a file you inherited and tells you, in plain words, what each column means and how they connect.

Never paste anything private — customer names, salaries, card numbers — into a chat you don't control. Strip or fake the sensitive columns first, then ask.