Looking for the Best AI Tools for Excel? Here Are My 6 Favorite Options

Data wrangling is a crucial skill in many roles today, making Excel proficiency essential. Instead of pretending to know Excel well, using advanced AI tools can enhance your productivity. While analysts need deep expertise, I often use Excel to report on marketing performance and have developed some proficiency with complex features. However, it can still be time-consuming and challenging. I explored the latest AI tools to see how they could ease my Excel tasks and save time. I tested several AI tools for Excel based on accuracy, ease of use, speed and reliability, and range of features. To ensure consistency, I used a sample spreadsheet of office supplies sales data across all tools. Ajelix offers free and paid plans, providing an intuitive dashboard and formula generation feature. It quickly produced accurate formulas and provided alternatives if needed. The AI chat function expanded formulas efficiently, making it user-friendly for business users rather than data experts. GPTExcel is another affordable tool with a formula generator and script feature. While it generated useful scripts, it required precise instructions and had minor issues, such as assuming default sheet names. Its ease of use and pop-up guides make it helpful for generating macros. Formularizer allows users to generate and explain formulas using text prompts. It worked well for generating formulas and explaining complex ones, although the free version limits you to text prompts without analyzing spreadsheets directly. Promptloop focuses on categorizing text data, answering questions, and creating dummy data. While useful for text-based data, its interface had a few unnecessary steps, making it less seamless compared to other tools. ChatGPT with GPT-4 showed significant improvement, handling tasks like creating pivot tables, visualizing data, and generating macros effectively. Despite initial frustrations, it proved powerful and user-friendly, especially for Excel beginners. Formula Bot offers various data and Excel-related tasks, including converting PDFs to Excel. Although it occasionally felt glitchy, its straightforward interface and impressive PDF conversion feature stood out. Advanced features like sentiment analysis and text classification are available with paid plans. Of all the tools tested, ChatGPT and Ajelix were the most impressive. ChatGPT excelled in data visualization and ease of use, making it ideal for those already familiar with the system. Ajelix stood out for its formula generation and AI chat feature, offering robust support for Excel-specific tasks. Overall, these AI tools can significantly enhance Excel productivity, filling knowledge gaps and saving valuable time.