OpenAI just released an Excel add-in that competes with its biggest investor's own product. Microsoft poured $13 billion into OpenAI. Microsoft makes Excel. Microsoft sells an AI assistant for Excel called Copilot. Now OpenAI has its own version, and early users say it's better.
The ChatGPT add-in lives inside Excel. You describe what you want in plain language and it builds spreadsheets, debugs formulas, summarizes data, makes edits. The beta is live for Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Plus/Pro users outside the EU. Hacker News users have already called out Microsoft's Copilot for Excel as frustratingly limited. One said it couldn't even identify what was in specific cells.
The add-in links answers to specific cells. Explains its reasoning. Asks before changing anything. Enterprise data stays out of model training by default. Admins get role-based controls. Nothing fancy here. Just the basics you'd want before handing business data to an AI.
Limitations are real. No Power Query, Pivot Tables, VBA macros, or named ranges yet. Large workbooks might choke the context window. A former add-in developer on Hacker News warned that badly implemented add-ins crawl in Excel's web version. This is beta. It will break. If OpenAI ships fixes faster than Microsoft ships features, Copilot has a real problem.