01
Text commands to implement Excel operations
Cool Table Chat Excel is an application tool that can realize interactive control of Excel in the form of text chat. No registration, unlimited times, direct use on the web, Chat Excel is quite good for lazy people and Excel novices.
Figure 1
We directly search for "Chat Excel" on the web page, or enter the URL https://chatexcel.com enter the home page of the application, click "Start Now" at the bottom, and you can see that the upper part of the Chat Excel interface has the same fonts, formatting and other basic tools as in ordinary Excel sheets, as well as functions such as summing, sorting, filtering, and pivot tables.
The input box with a word limit of 50 words below is the main functional area of Chat Excel, and there are two buttons on the right side of the input box: "Undo" and "Generate".
Figure 2 The home page of the Cool Table Chat Excel application
The first part in the upper right corner of Chat Excel is a usage example, which has three sub-directories, namely "China GDP", "Global Population", and "World University Rankings". We import the Excel spreadsheet of the World University Rankings directly because it has two sheets, which can be used for both single-table and cross-table data processing. We enter commands such as "How many schools are selected in each region in Table 1, and the results are ranked in descending order" and "Top 10 schools in China in Table 2", and Chat Excel can quickly give the results at the current location.
By clicking the "Undo" button, we can revert the steps to the original form, so we don't have to worry about messing up the data. Chat Excel can also identify and display the data of the two tables without errors by entering commands such as "information about schools that appear in Table 1 but not in Table 2", "Add an * sign to the names of universities that are in the top 10 in both tables", etc.
It can be said that Chat Excel can respond quickly to simple instructions such as modifying formatting, statistics, and cross-table statistics. In terms of results, it also has a high degree of accuracy. However, in the process of using it, the author found that one of the main problems is that Chat Excel has high requirements for the conciseness and clarity of the instruction language, and if it can't understand the instruction, then it chooses to strike directly. This requires the user to constantly adjust the instruction to adapt to it.
02
Continue to interact until you're satisfied
Compared with many other products that interact once, one of the biggest features of Chat Excel is continuous interaction, that is, each generation result can add new requirements from users to the table data generated in the previous round.
Figure 3 Cool Table Chat Excel page
We clicked "Upload File" in the upper right corner and imported a self-created Excel sheet with the content of reports related to a certain topic from 1985 to 2023, in which the main statistical items are the name of the report, the time of the report, the layout of the report, the source of the news, the genre of the report, and the topic of the report.
It is worth noting that Chat Excel has certain requirements for the accuracy of the format of the uploaded table. For example, if one of the articles has a report date of "1992/2/16", but it is not recognized after importing, Chat Excel enters it as "33650", which requires us to manually enter the adjustment.
The author first tried to enter the command "delete the column column and the specific source column of the report", and Chat Excel deleted the content of the above two columns, but still kept the corresponding position. If you change the command to "remove all column columns and specific source columns", Chat Excel will simply erase these two columns from the entire table. It can be said that the Chat Excel background program is relatively fixed for the cognition and understanding of certain words.
The author has continuously entered commands such as "the report theme is culture, and the page name is the supplement", "arrange the report in order of the report layout", "add a column, mark the report genre as a message, mark the newsletter as B, and mark the comment as C", and Chat Excel can be stably presented. Finally, we can export the table to a standard Excel spreadsheet with one click after we get the table we are satisfied with.
The biggest advantage of Chat Excel is that we no longer need to query related operations when we make data statistics on Excel sheets, and only need to express our needs through natural language. But we still see some limitations. How to describe your needs briefly and concisely is currently the difficulty of using Chat Excel. The requirements are not clear, and the experience may be completely different. Secondly, whether it is emphasizing the standardization of the uploaded table format, or it is difficult to check the correctness due to the large amount of data, Chat Excel needs to be constantly improved and updated.