Brian, I'm gonna be honest with you: That smells like pure gasoline.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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It's about time all those math types learned to relax a bit. These numbers in these spreadsheets don't need to be exact all the time. It's really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how "right" any individual field is. Error bars are there for a reason people!
Vibe accounting
Microsoft literally calls the feature "vibe working." Youre not far off the actual name.
They aren't even pretending to care anymore.
Sounds like a good way to AI-wash any accounting fraud. Now you can just blame it on Microsoft.
Didn't openai use sloptimized in thier ai video slop maker release too
I mean, it's on brand with everything else these days: https://www.newsweek.com/how-much-trump-worth-depends-how-he-feels-384720
It's really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how "right" any individual field is.
Just like the Xerox copier/scanners that helpfully kept scanned images small by reusing parts of the image elsewhere. Like, all these 6s on your scanned invoices can totally be replaced with 8s. There's just a tiny degradation in the overall image, it shouldn't be a problem!
Xerox should have just called it AI compression and people would have been throwing money at them.
Especially on blueprints, these small file sizes are important. Doesn't matter if you replace these load bearing numbers with different ones, as long as the file is small
“Please calculate the totals to reflect a favourable result”
Sounds like what accountants do already
Accountants tally the numbers and hand you the totals. Twisting them is unethical and can lead to them losing their licenses.
Analysts manipulate the numbers to push a message. No ethics allowed.
Signed, an analyst raised by an accountant. Interacting with other analysts is infuriating.
5/4 times that's true.
It's all about whether your accounts give a vibe of truthiness. Auditors need to chill.
Trillions of dollars to develop a calculator that's wrong sometimes.
AI Agents having access to the functionality of Excel means that they won’t be wrong with the actual calculations though, since it doesn’t do 5x10 in the LLM but instead uses excels built in functions to do it.
AI and excel are a match made in heaven tbh. Same with AI and databases.
Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It's solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There's a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can't remember how it goes.
Just look what they're doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM... Kill all your main characters.
yep. it's the one tool that is incredibly versatile in the workplace and for which I do not have a replacement
are there better tools? quite often. would those tools be able to be used by anybody opening the files you are sharing with them? nope. and keeping things in the same format means it's very easy to move data across files and link things up.
forms, trackers, calculations, data logging, all easy to reference/transfer to one another and I can expect anybody on my team to be able to work with files I send them without having to teach them how to use a different program
And you dare not risk your financial data when plotting a migration! Been there, done that, no one ever suggested moving from Excel to another product.
How is adding new features that you don’t have to use but which can be insanely powerful “fucking with it”?
Some computer scientists really went "we made a computer that is programmed in a different way and is sometimes correct" and these idiot corpos went "wow put it in everything"
Excel is such an incredible piece of shit. There's many reasons to hate it for me, but what i hate the most is not being able to do relationships in any meaningful way. So often i need to have one to many relationships and this garbage makes it impossible. Data consistency? Nope. Opening a csv? Fuck you! Why the fuck are there online tools that are better at this shit? You had 40 years ffs. No amount of AI is going to fix this turd. God I hate Excel.
There's a ton of reasons to hate Excel, I'm sure, but I don't think lack of support for relational data is a reasonable one. There's tools for that job, but Excel isn't trying to be one of them.
Just because it doesn't offer features a database has doesn't mean people aren't trying to use it as one
I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades
Yeah, not denying that people use Excel to do all kinds of crazy shit. People using the tool wrong isn't the tool's fault though, right?
Reminded me of these two projects by some Dylan Tallchief on YouTube:
He first made a programmable drum machine, then a DAW in Excel.
Wrong! If I am using a hammer to deliver babies I expect hammer manufacturers to put a rubber coating on the claw so it doesn't scratch the baby as I pry it out.
I get that. But it's a case that's just so incredibly common. Tagging/categorization. We end up with multiple columns like 'cat 1', 'cat 2', etc. Or doing pivot tables. I guess to me there's pretty much always something that can do the job better, but the reality is that in the corporate setting I operate in everybody uses Excel.
You are trying to use Excel like a database and that’s not its job. Use Access for that, if you must stick within the Office ecosystem
If I'm the only one doing it then I'd prefer to stick with sqlite. But the reality is that everyone I work with does these kinds of things in excel, and it's a shitshow. Yes, u could say 'don't blame the tool', but it's ms shoving it down our throats and they could've done much better with the time they had.
With power query, Excel can perform more database-like functions, I use it all the time! It comes with it's own quirks however
0% of the time it works because I shut that shit off the first minute I saw it
$20 of the time
Damn thats high!/s
Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why 'copilot in excel' (not agent mode) wasn't designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn't designed for it.
54% isn’t really low when people only get 72%.