this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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It obviously added "A+1+2+3" and got 15 after looking up the typical value of A.
And it was still wrong
Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71...
Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it's just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn't think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense... Wait holy shit... I got it
2+3 = 5
1 = 1
Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) "1"+(str) "5" = "15"
It didn't consider any of the numbers, because the user didn't provide the context argument to the function.
I'm betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can't confirm as I don't use excel but that seems to be the issue.
No, it's a lot more basic than that. You provide
=COPILOT()the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.Wait... Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can't see the data in excel? That's insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don't see why excel wouldn't be able to...
Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you're working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.
Wow, yeah most people who want to use a function like this will mess that up...
I genuinely cannot think of a single use-case where you would want Excel to look at your entire spreadsheet without it being a horrible mistake. You definitely do not want AI to do math for you, and that is thankfully not what this thing is designed for.
True but I could see using Ai to write a function which does the math... Like I write a prompt (simplified example as I'm on my phone) like "sum all the values above A4 and place result in A4" and the Ai should then write the function "sum(A1, A3)" and place it in cell A4
You can certainly use AI to generate the function and paste it in, but that is not what
=COPILOT()is for. You could just have any other LLM do that.Maybe not what it's intended for but I promise that's what it will be used for...
Or A can be 10 in hexadecimal, but that wouldn't fit either.
Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I'm betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.
How many gigawatts did it take for you to figure that out?
1.21 jiggawatts!
Great Scott!!
When they called the function, they didn’t specify any cells. The copilot function, like any other Excel function, cannot see cells that aren’t given to it.
The second argument is blank, so it just Gave a typical answer to a sum question.
The typical value of A is 9, according to copilot.
Off by 1. Not too bad.