That’s how I use Chat GPT. Not for coding, but for help on how to get Excel to do things. I guess some of what I want to do are fairly esoteric, so just searching for help doesn’t really turn up anything useful. If I explain to GPT what I’ll trying to do, it’ll give me avenues to explore.
Can you give an example? This sounds like exactly what I've always wanted.
I have a spreadsheet with items with their price and quantity bought. I want to include a discount with multiple tiers, based on how much items have been bought, and have a small table where I can define quantity and a discount that applies to that quantity. Which Excel functions should I use?
Response:
You can achieve this in Excel using the VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH functions along with the IF function.
Create a table with quantity and corresponding discounts.
Use VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH to find the discount based on the quantity in your main table.
Use IF to apply different discounts based on quantity tiers.
That's really cool, I gotta try that in the future. Thanks!
It's shunned upon in the Excel pro scene (shout-out to my boi Makro), but xlookup can be used instead
Index / Match gang represent. Much more flexible than Vlookup.
That's exactly how I use it (but for more things than excel), it works pretty well as a documentation 'searcher' + template/example maker
Using AI in this way is what finally pushed me to learn databases instead of trying to make excel do tricks it's not optimal for anyways.
I tried a bunch of iterations of various AI resources and even stuff like the Google Sheets integration and most of them just annoyed me into finding better ways to search for what I was trying to do. Eventually I had to stop ignoring the real problem and pivot to software better optimized for the work I was trying to do with it.
That’s how I use Chat GPT. Not for coding, but for help on how to get Excel to do things. I guess some of what I want to do are fairly esoteric, so just searching for help doesn’t really turn up anything useful. If I explain to GPT what I’ll trying to do, it’ll give me avenues to explore.
Can you give an example? This sounds like exactly what I've always wanted.
I have a spreadsheet with items with their price and quantity bought. I want to include a discount with multiple tiers, based on how much items have been bought, and have a small table where I can define quantity and a discount that applies to that quantity. Which Excel functions should I use?
Response:
You can achieve this in Excel using the VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH functions along with the IF function.
Create a table with quantity and corresponding discounts.
Use VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH to find the discount based on the quantity in your main table.
Use IF to apply different discounts based on quantity tiers.
That's really cool, I gotta try that in the future. Thanks!
It's shunned upon in the Excel pro scene (shout-out to my boi Makro), but xlookup can be used instead
Index / Match gang represent. Much more flexible than Vlookup.
That's exactly how I use it (but for more things than excel), it works pretty well as a documentation 'searcher' + template/example maker
Using AI in this way is what finally pushed me to learn databases instead of trying to make excel do tricks it's not optimal for anyways.
I tried a bunch of iterations of various AI resources and even stuff like the Google Sheets integration and most of them just annoyed me into finding better ways to search for what I was trying to do. Eventually I had to stop ignoring the real problem and pivot to software better optimized for the work I was trying to do with it.