Beyond Text: Excel's Prowess Vs. AI Dialogues

Beyond Text: Excel’s Prowess Vs. AI Dialogues

AI can now be used for more purposes than ever before. While previously out of reach, tasks such as creating high-quality art and composing web apps are now possible. Many jobs that were formerly unattainable by computers are suddenly at risk of automation.

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With advancements increasing at an alarming rate, it’s easy to worry that your job may be at risk of automation. Despite the surprising abilities AI programs like ChatGPT have already shown, there are still places where humans can outshine them. Here are three things you can do using Excel that are still out of reach for ChatGPT.

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1. Using Excel for Long-Term Report Storage and Data Entry

There’s hope in a few common tasks for those worried that AI may be coming for their job. Gaining extra competence in Excel’s VBA and the wide world of automated analysis tools can give you a leg up in the job market.

ChatGPT can generate and analyze a variety of data and general reporting information. One thing that it still hasn’t mastered, however, is storing that information for more than one session. That means that getting the most out of an ever-evolving data set still requires a human to format and sanitize data .

Despite the doubtlessly accurate inferences AI might be able to make given a set of data, re-entering that information with each session is still incredibly time-consuming and problematic. This means there’s still a place for making highly-formatted sanitized reports, performing required maintenance, and storing the data for long-term use.

It also means that despite ChatGPT’s best efforts, unless they build in a customer interface that is specifically designed for multi-session uses, a human will always be required to re-upload relevant data.

In addition to simple storage and data entry, there’s always an open market available for recurring automated analysis that is beyond the current capability of ChatGPT. While using ChatGPT to analyze sales trends is useful, getting an alert informing you of a massive market shift is far handier.

Many companies offer specialized services that enable you to connect your Excel-generated sales data via an API to monitor data in real time. Doing so saves time manually entering data into AI chatbots like ChatGPT. It also totally eliminates the need for such cumbersome analysis altogether, while still maintaining human-necessary jobs.

While building out a single report can be handy, useful trends are more visible over long periods of time. Building dashboards to visualize data trends and raise red flags immediately when things go wrong is still a highly valuable skill.

2. Customizable Report Creation in Excel

While a single report is simple to create with ChatGPT, a set of data frozen in time isn’t always beneficial. One of the most potent abilities that Excel gives us the ability to create reports that the reader can instantly customize.

Rather than taking the time to create a separate expense report for each department in your company, you can use Excel to create a single customized company-wide report. Adding a dropdown that filters data by the value in a single column is fast and straightforward to do.

It can make a basic expense report able to be used multiple times across an entire organization. Doing so saves you from making single-use reports only focused on one time period within a single department. This allows users to filter information based on the work they are currently doing.

Adding in a few controls can make a more complex and nuanced experience for the person reading your report. Consider customizing time frames, adding limits to remove outliers, or calculating custom data in your reports.

Data-driven dashboards are almost always a valuable addition to reporting systems storing large quantities of info. If you’re capable of creating a dashboard that can easily handle large volumes of data, you’re likely to always remain gainfully employed. Take the time to learn how to use some of Excel’s more esoteric functions to ensure your readers can tailor your reports to their departmental needs.

Make your reports more useful by adding some simple Excel features . Ensure your reports can pull variable timeframes, highlight potential problems automatically, and sanitize data for long-term storage and flexibility.

3. Easy-to-Use Forms in Excel

Forms are another great Excel option for those looking for value that ChatGPT can’t provide. Entering information manually can be time-consuming and frustrating. Giving end users the option to enter data independently as it arises frees up time and energy better spent analyzing the results.

AI programs may be able to tell you how to populate all the items in a form, but making it user-friendly is another story. Creating a simple-to-use spreadsheet that analyzes the data that it’s given is a much more streamlined process than having the end user give you the data, only for you to then give it to an AI tool to analyze.

Pairing a little bit of basic VBA with Excel’s extensive list of controls allows for creating surprisingly complex forms. Linking different spreadsheets with forms is a straightforward yet valuable skill to master. ChatGPT may be capable of interpreting data, but giving your users a secure way to enter data is still beyond its reach.

For those looking to blend forms and long-term data storage, looking into different ways to export data from Excel is essential. Learning how to take data from an entry form to a SQL database can help insulate your job and keep your work essential.

ChatGPT Isn’t Going to Automate You Out of a Job Yet

Excel has many tasks that are still beyond the range of ChatGPT and its cohort of machine learning-driven knockoffs. With new advancements increasing at an alarming rate, it’s all too easy to worry that automation may be aiming for your job next.

For all the progress that AI has made, however, many positions still require a human. Limitations like short-term storage and the need to re-run data to produce multiple reports still leave tools like ChatGPT lacking.

Learning how to create customizable reports and forms that enable data entry in Excel can help preserve your job. For those concerned that their position may be facing automation, there are still plenty of Excel skills out of AI’s range of ability for the foreseeable future.