Excel and ChatGPT Supercharge your Excel Skills.

• Author: Lenning, Jeff

Have you ever encountered any of these common Excel situations where you need to:

* Understand a complex formula or write a formula?

* Understand a VBA macro that was written by an Excel power user who is no longer available?

* Write a VBA macro?

* Get general Excel help?

When you encounter these types of situations, what do you do? My guess is you probably start with a Google search, then follow several links to various blog posts and videos. Sometimes, they will provide you with the answers you are seeking, but sometimes not. So, when they don't, what do you do? You are totally stuck... or are you?

Here's how a free tool called ChalGPT can help with all of these and much more. Let's get to it.

ChatGPT Primer

In the simplest terms, ChatGPT is a service that provides text-based responses to your prompts. So, when you provide a prompt such as:

When was Excel released?

ChatGPT will provide a response like:

Microsoft Excel was first released in September 1985 for Apple Macintosh computers. It was later released for IBM-compatible PCs in November 1987. Since then, Excel has undergone many updates and versions, and it remains one of the most popular spreadsheet software applications in use today.

In this article, I'll show you how ChatGPT can help with your Excel work. But know that the knowledge base of ChatGPT is unbelievably immense. How does ChatGPT describe itself? To find out, I asked it.

I entered the following prompt: Can you describe ChatGPT in one sentence?

And got the following response: I am ChatGPT, a large language model designed to understand natural language input and generate human-like responses using deep learning algorithms.

If you'd like to learn more, head to openai.com. If you'd like to create an account and use the service for free, visit chat.openai.com.

Understanding a Complex Formula

Let's say you open a workbook and encounter a formula written by someone else. For example:

=RIGHT (B8, LEN (B8)-FIND (",", B8)-1)

You'd like to understand what it does.

So, you use the following prompt with ChatGPT: What does this excel formula do: =RIGHT(B8,LEN(B8)-FIND(",",B8)-1)

ChatGPT response: This Excel formula extracts a portion of text from a cell in column B, specifically the text to the right of the comma (",") in the cell.

Here's a breakdown of how the formula works:

* The LEN function returns the length of the text string in cell B8.

* The FIND function searches for the position of the comma in the text string of cell B8.

*...