Excel How To Write a Formula with ChatGPT

Microsoft Excel is one of the most powerful and versatile software programs available. It allows users to quickly and accurately organize, analyze, and present data. With the help of ChatGPT, learning how to write Excel formulas just got easier. While ChatGPT may not be able to write formulas that are always 100% accurate, it can certainly help get you started and speed up the learning process.

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Step-by-step guide

Let’s begin by looking at how to use ChatGPT to write Excel formulas. We will use three illustrations, or exercises, to walk through this process.

Exercise 1

Let’s say our worksheet looks a bit like this:

And let’s say we would like to write a formula that returns the CustID for the customer that has the largest Amount.

If we don’t know which functions to use to write such a formula, we could search Google and browse through blog posts and videos for the answer. It will most likely take some time to browse through a few posts. Almost certainly none of them will have the exact data in the exact columns that we have. So, we will sort of have to hack the formula to fit our worksheet. Another option is ChatGPT.

With ChatGPT, we are able to describe the data locations so that it writes a formula that will work in our specific worksheet with our specific data.

We first open a new chat at the free chat.openai.com site. We then enter a prompt such as this: “Please write an Excel formula that returns the CustID for the largest Amount. The CustID column is C and the Amount column is D.” You hit Enter and ChatGPT provides this response:

ChatGPT not only provides the formula, it also explains how it works along with the functions and arguments. This is very helpful because it allows us to learn Excel formulas within the context of our workbooks.

You’ll also notice that the formula block has a Copy code button. We click it and can then paste the formula into our Excel worksheet. For example, when we paste it into cell B6, we confirm it works:

Let’s go to another example.

Exercise 2

Our worksheet looks like this:

We want to get help figuring out how to write a formula that returns the total of region S.

So, we open a new chat and enter the following prompt: “Please write an Excel formula that returns the sum of region S. The regions are in column C and the amounts to sum are in column D.” We hit Enter and ChatGPT provides the following response:

We copy the formula and paste it into cell B6 and bam:

Let’s do one more example.

Exercise 3

In this exercise, we want to write a formula that pulls the first name out of this full name column.

We enter the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Please write an Excel formula that retrieves the first name from column B. Note the first row is 9. The format of column B is last name, comma, first name. None of the full names include middle initials or middle names, so don’t worry about that.” ChatGPT provides the following formula:

We copy and paste it into C9 and fill it down, and bam:

Conclusion

Using ChatGPT to write formulas for Excel is a great way to save time and discover functions. It can provide tailored formulas that are specific to your data set. It also provides explanations of how the formulas work in the context of your data set. This is especially helpful for beginners who are just getting started with Excel.

So if you’re looking for a way to quickly and easily write formulas for Excel, give ChatGPT a try. It may just be the tool that can help you unlock the incredible power of Excel formulas.

If I can provide any additional assistance, or if you have other ChatGPT suggestions or uses, please share by posting a comment below … thanks!

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