For what it’s worth, even before the age of AI (as in the last 10-15 years, excluding the most recent 5), a part of my job was to report such information upwards.
But even then, spreadsheets (computerized or otherwise) were almost never the final deliverable, just an intermediary state and data store for the final report. Raw numbers in, processed by spreadsheets (and/or code), then rendered into presentations (maybe with an embedded table or chart or two sourced from the spreadsheet), executive summaries, online visualizations & charts & dashboards, etc.
Even as a programmer, there were some situations where having the GUI and immediate feedback of a spreadsheet app (vs data analysis in code) WAS very helpful, such as for iterative charting (should I use a scatterplot for this or a box chart, do I smooth the trends, how do the clusters look, etc.). Simpler visualizations are a lot quicker in a spreadsheet than in specialized code or visualization apps, and are a good approximation (if lacking a bit of polish).
But even then, the spreadsheets results were pretty “raw” and it’s almost never what the higher-ups wanted, unless there was some truly extraordinary finding and they needed to double-check the math (and even then, they’d typically just ask “how sure are you about this?” rather than digging in on their own).
When i was a young actuary, we had storerooms full of documentation of old reports. And most of that documentation was giant “green sheets” of paper, full of manual calculations. Those green sheets were also called spreadsheets. I don’t think you are wrong, but i also think effectively all spreadsheets have been computerized for decades, and that’s what this question is about.
In answer to the OP’s question, i never use the integrated AI. But I’m old, and the time to learn it isn’t worth it.
On the other hand, when I’m not sure of the syntax for something (maybe i want the last four letters of the entries in a column, or a rounded date, or a different kind of graph than i usually use…) i always Google it. Google used to be great for that. It’s worse now, but the AI summary is usually good enough to get what i need. And i expect that AI summary to improve and to be basically always right in a year or two.
I hope they incorporate AI into their help functionality, which would be a big upgrade.
I agree with others that the AI currently being appended to everything is not currently helpful. I turned it off on my phone because the new AI assistant was much less useful than the old Google assistant (which is still available.) As an example, if i use the old one and say “hey Google, set a timer for 5 minutes” it just does that, and says “you have set a timer for 5 minutes”. The AI responds with paragraphs about what times can do and doesn’t reliably actually set the things. The AI response for “navigate to Davey Jones House” doesn’t do anything without giving the AI free rein of all your personal data, which i don’t currently want to give it.
It’s not “flawed” if it works – a basic truth that can be said about many things. The ability to access specific fields in a spreadsheet from another application – to do a mail/merge for example – is a database-like function that’s very useful.
I hear ya. But it’s also a hard situation for “normal” people to be in…
In our field, working with tooling is the job. In other fields, though, the tools are just that… mere tools. I can’t expect them to keep up with every change. Even software developers struggle with that. I can’t imagine, say, how anyone would build houses if a hammer was replaced by something newer and better (but secretly flawed in some way) every 5 years.
In high school we used Excel, and by the time I was in college that was completely replaced by Google Sheets. In college I learned R, and that was nearly completely replaced by Python by the time I graduated. At my first job I learned Filemaker in order to migrate it to MySQL. At my next job MySQL was dated and Postgres was the new shiny. At the one after that, manual databases were passe and it was all just API calls to some cloud. The one after that, API calls were too hard and no-code databases like Airtable were all the rage. And then not a few years later, AI made all of that more or less irrelevant. That was all in the span of a decade or so.
Meanwhile, at least computer spreadsheets have been around and relatively stable and backward compatible for the better part of a half century! Someone who stubbornly stuck with Excel as their single source of truth would be in a better situation than someone who migrated 10 times in as many years. There’s a reason banks and such are still on Fortran, I suppose…
Yeah, I agree with ya — I was just trying to rephrase @scudsucker’s argument to make sure I understood it.
In between the perfect and the terrible, real-world use cases have a lot of gray areas where good enough is good enough.
You want to run a small ecommerce shop off Excel, well, more power to ya. You price something wrong, you lose a few hundred dollars, not the end of the world.
On the other hand, I hope Amazon.com is run on something more stringent than a spreadsheet.
Thank you for the answer. I apologize for the hijack.
I was just a tad confused by this and the companion thread. It seemed as tho some folk were giving the term spreadsheet some special significance. Whereas to me, spreadsheets are pretty basic to anyone who has ever seen an organization’s proposed/last year’s budget. Especially when some posters were claiming “spreadsheets” were more important to teach grade schoolers than analog time.
I know I tend towards the pedantic, but your use of the word “computerized” also caught my attention. Even if I am word processing a spreadsheet, it is done on a computer. But I could understand and make use of the spreadsheet whether it was generated on a computer by whatever software, on an old fashioned typewriter, or by hand.
But yes, people use spreadsheets, which might be generated by hand in graph paper, in dedicated spreadsheet software, in database software, or probably by AI, all the time, because it’s a good interface for humans to interact with data. And because it’s such a good interface, dedicated spreadsheet software is extremely popular.
Although I do think there is divide here. Those who create on Excel style spreadsheets regularly are under the impression that almost everyone does and are perhaps surprised by the very large number that never creates on them at all; and we who never or very very rarely create with them are unaware that they are really actively used in that active creation manner that much by that many others.
In any case I remain convinced that the abilities to understand data, to meaningfully and critically analyze it, to know how to present it well, are not contingent on facility in creating spreadsheets, and that the spreadsheet creation tool will be relegated to AI very soon, with users being entrusted to ask the right questions and interpret it well critically.
Critical thinking is one of the things we’re only getting worse and lazier at, and increased reliance on AI is likely to further worsen that.
Superficial propaganda, on the other hand, using cherry-picked metrics, anecdata, and misleading graphs? 1273%. There’ll be a few story-shapers and everyone else will just have to blindly go along with their new, personalized realities. The information gap is about to get a whole lot wider…
AI isn’t a neutral observer or reporter of facts. It’s a trained-to-be-biased statistical model paid for by a handful of tech companies funded by profit-driven investors eager to make a return, using whatever means necessary. Objectivity is just one of the many casualties inherently sacrificed in that approach. It’s not a force for good, it’s a force for the further concentration of wealth at the expense of the public good.
Meh. Poor critical thinking predates AI. Laziness too. I dealt with many stupid conclusions made from spreadsheet data because of idiotic analysis and the wrong questions being asked of it.
AI is a tool. It can be used poorly or well, to mislead or to discover. I trust an agent to mislead me less on data regarding my department than I trust the administrative team!
I’m sure they have real uses for practical purposes, but equally I suspect they are often used as ‘baffle them with bullshit’ presentations like the execrable powerpoint.
As a systems programmer, I don’t think I have ever used a spreadsheet for anything important?
I use two spreadsheets daily. One of them is a shared sheet between classrooms during school dismissal that shows which students, from which classes, are being picked up at which station. This one is highly automated, beyond my ability to create, but very user-friendly to me and other staff. The other is a spreadsheet I made that helps me keep track of which student I work with at which time, in which grade level, for which subject. I primarily use it with the sort and filter functions, but I can also use it to create and track student-specific notes and to conduct a quick analysis (e.g., to count students in different groups to ensure my numbers are relatively balanced, to check top test scores, etc.). There’s a third one that I use weekly, which contains a plethora of student information drawn from a variety of database in an easily-accessed form; when a parent asks (for example) whether their kid should be in a small group for advanced math, I can pull up all their math scores for the past three years to inform my answer. And when I was union president, we collected survey responses in spreadsheets that enabled us to create quick charts and data summaries to present to the school board and central office administration.
They’re super-helpful to me, both the complex ones that I don’t know how to create, and the simpler ones with basic formulae that I can create to streamline my work.
I use and create spreadsheets all the time. AI has sped up my creation of spreadsheets and allowed me to to do more with them than ever before (I mean, if I had sufficient time I could do all I am doing, but I don’t have that time). Oddly, I’ve found Copilot isn’t great with Excel while Claude knocks it out of the park. Claude Code allows me to drop new csvs in a folder and get updated spreadsheets/reports, track changes over time, etc.
Nothing wrong with Powerpoint. If a presentation is bullshit, the problem is between the chair and the keyboard, as the saying goes. And “bullshit” includes presentations that contain actual useful information, but are unnecessarily glitzy to the point of being distracting. When you’re giving a presentation, the point is to concisely convey relevant information, not “hey, look at the cool stuff Powerpoint can do!”
Neither have I. I use spreadsheets for personal data organization. When I was working in IT, the tools I used were MS Project to manage project timelines, Word for documentation, and Powerpoint to placate management (and I guess sometimes in design meetings to discuss design ideas, but a whiteboard was often better).
Okay, i basically can’t work without spreadsheets, so I’m in the “most days” category.
And the spreadsheets i use may be replaced with other software products, but no, they won’t be replaced with my querying an AI. Although it’d be nice if AI got good enough to enter the numbers from the sources, and i only needed to check them. And that’s plausible, although nowhere close to reality today.
