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We put the Thing That Can't Do Numbers™ in your spreadsheets (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/iiiiiiitttttttttttt@programming.dev
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

There are no values from the spreadsheet in this case.

What hill are you trying to die on here? In the picture, the numbers input are clearly 1,2 and 3.

They could of course require that optional cell or cell range parameter after the prompt,

No. It is trivial to identify if the input is text or value. You don't need an LMM to do that.

Excel famously thinks everything is a date

That's only interpreting data entry. Date values are stored in cells as doubles.

Not to mention there are other things to do with numbers which don't require arithmetic.

Yes these are the use cases where an LLM would add some (questionable) value.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    The text field says =COPILOT("sum the numbers above"). It doesn't work that way. Excel does not have any concept of what "above" means here. Those numbers are not used in the calculation whatsoever. To reference those numbers, the field should say =COPILOT("sum the numbers in", A1:A3).

    What the user did here was ask the LLM to generate some text based on a text prompt and no other data, and the LLM decided to answer with a string containing only digits.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Excel does not have any concept of what "above" means here.

    Excel knows the address of the calling function.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Yes, but "above" just goes into the LLM, which does who-knows-what with it, and certainly isn't designed to address cells that way. So to the LLM that's just like any other arbitrary text.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yes, but "above" just goes into the LLM,

    I don't believe even Microsoft are this stupid. The llm will have tools to interrogate the spreadsheet.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    There would be no way to do that reliably. There's too much weird stuff people might say to reference things, and the LLM would definitely act on the wrong cells more often than not.

    Excel already has a perfectly unambiguous way to provide a specific range of cells, Which is why the =COPILOT() function lets you supply those in the second parameter. I'm assuming they get passed to the LLM as context, likely encoded as a markdown table. LLMs love parsing markdown, apparently.

    The user provided no such range of cells, though, so the LLM is most likely seeing none of those other cells, and is just working based on random values from the Internet.

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