Microsoft researchers have unveiled a large language model that could improve interaction and understanding of spreadsheets, a major leap forward in AI’s ability to process Excel files.
Sketched in a paperWith the project ‘SpeadsheetLLM: Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models’, the team aims to investigate the complexities and challenges of applying AI to structured, logical and formulaic datasets.
SpreadsheetLLM promises the ability to combine these datasets with the already proven capabilities of large language models.
SpreadsheetLLM can make AI more efficient in your Excel sheet
According to the researchers, “SpreadsheetLLM is an approach for encoding the contents of a spreadsheet in a format that can be used with large language models (LLMs) and that enables these models to reason about the contents of a spreadsheet.”
The research notes that spreadsheets are widely used in a variety of business activities, from simple data entry to complex financial modeling. Despite the importance of these numerical files, existing LLMs have struggled to structure the data and formulas. By encoding the data in a package that LLMs can understand, Microsoft researchers hope to unlock the processing power of current generative AI tools that existing LLMs use within the Excel environment.
By harnessing the full potential of spreadsheet data, companies using generative AI tools can improve their data-driven decision-making and increase the efficiency of other administrative tasks.
While SpreadsheetLLM is little more than a research project at this point, the work to improve compatibility between Excel files and existing AI tools is a sign of the ever-evolving power of AI.
Moreover, the company hasn’t yet committed to developing such a tool on a larger scale, but Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI and subsequent rollout of generative AI capabilities across its office apps imply that the tech giant is committed to making AI more accessible.
