Last Updated on April 23, 2025 by admin
Today, data wrangling is an essential skill in almost every role, making Excel an essential skill. But, the days of lying about your Excel proficiency are over; instead, you can use the best AI tools on the market for Excel.Today, data wrangling is an essential skill in almost every role, making Excel an essential skill. But, the days of lying about your Excel proficiency are over; instead, you can use the best AI tools on the market for Excel. While analysts and data scientists need serious expertise, I’m just someone who regularly has to export data from multiple tools and leverage Excel to report on marketing performance across different channels. Since I use the program so much, I’ve become pretty adept at more complicated Excel features, but there’s no doubt it can still be time-consuming and tricky. So, I wanted to see how all the recent advances in AI could make those hours spent in spreadsheets easier and how much time I could save. I went and found some of the best AI tools for Excel, tested them, and compiled my findings below. How I Tested the Best AI Tools and Plugins for Excel There’s a lot you can do in Excel. I use everything from simple formulas to more advanced macros. I tested the tools and plugins for: Accuracy: Often, I’m dealing with really big data sets, as I’m sure many of you are. These can make calculations and formulas complex, so an Excel tool needs to be capable of handling tasks with accuracy. Ease of Use: There’s nothing worse than a confusing tool. Excel itself can be confusing enough, so a clear interface and good UX should be a given here. Speed and Reliability: We turn to AI to be more efficient. A tool needs to be quick and reliable if I’m going to invest time and money in it. Range of Features: There’s a lot AI can do in Excel. The more features a single tool has, the better. For testing purposes, I downloaded a sample spreadsheet containing office supplies sales data to be used in every tool, eliminating possible variables. The Best AI Tools and Plugins for Excel 1. Ajelix Pricing: Free plans are available. Standard plans cost $9 per month. Business plans cost $40 per month, and business plus plans cost $200 per month. Even though I work in Excel and Google Sheets a lot, I’ve never been great at remembering complicated formulas and functions. With Ajelix, I don’t have to. Within two minutes of jumping into Ajelix, I was able to type out what I was trying to do with my data, and the tool spat out multiple formula options for me to try. When I first opened the tool, I got a really nice, user-friendly dashboard. Since I tend to struggle with formula mistakes, I clicked on the “Generate Formula” option. In my sample sheet, I wanted a quick way to find out how many pencils were sold. So I gave the Ajelix tool the gist of what I wanted with the prompt, “Sum the number of units in Column E when the value of Column D is in pencils:” Ajelix instantly returned a formula with a handy “copy” button. It also gave me an alternative to try if the first one didn’t work. Then, I spotted the “Chat with AI” button and decided to try it out. The button took me to a chat with all the information about my formula already loaded. I asked the AI assistant to expand my formula to include the number of desks sold as well, and instantly received the formula. The formula worked perfectly. But to test the AI assistant a little more, I told the tool that the formula didn’t work. I instantly received another way to try to achieve what I needed. What I liked: Ajelix is a user-friendly tool that seems to be geared toward the average business user rather than a data expert. In addition to AI assistance, you can also use the business intelligence (BI) functionality for advanced data visualization. It’s worth noting you’ll need to pay to use Ajelix long term to AI functionality. But pricing is pretty reasonable at $6 per month for the Standard plan or $20 per month for a business plan. 2. GPTExcel Pricing: Free plans are available. Paid plans cost $6 per month. GPTExcel is another handy and cost-efficient tool that uses AI to help users streamline how they use Excel. It has a formula generator, but I also wanted to try out the Scripts feature. With the Script tool, you can explain what you want your script to do, or you can reverse the process by providing GPTExcel with a script and having the tool to explain it to you. In my sample spreadsheet, I decided I wanted to generate automation where any row where the Sales value in Column G exceeds $200, the row would be highlighted. Here’s what I gave GPTExcel and what it provided for me: I went back to my Excel sheet with the script and put it to the test. After opening the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications — a Microsoft programming language) editor in Excel and running the macro, here were the results: The first time I ran the macro, I got an error, but that was on my part. I failed to give GPTExcel the correct name of the sheet, and it assumed the sheet was named the default Sheet 1. But my sheet was called SalesOrders, so I had to adjust the script to get it to run. Once it did, I found the script was not very sophisticated and had highlighted the column headers in the sheet as well. If you know Excel, any issues with the output will be quite obvious for you to fix, but someone unfamiliar with the software might struggle. Also, like many generative AI tools, you need to be extremely specific with your request to get the right output the