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Microsoft Is Retiring Excel’s COPILOT() Function After Just One Year
(windowsreport.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
287 points (100.0% liked)
Fuck AI
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It has some reasonable use-cases when dealing with text, the problem is that it's extremely easy for idiots to misuse it, either by trying to do math or by not supplying any cells in the optional second argument.
Not requiring the second argument was nuts, and it should probably have refused any query resulting in a number as well.
Ah yes, those idiots trying to do math in Excel.
Idiots using a function without understanding what it actually does. Plenty of functions in Excel operate on text.
Or trying to do text in excel?!
You may not like it, but Excel has long been the tool of choice for people who should really use a database but already know how to use this nice hammer.
COPILOT()was marketed as a tool where you could pull in a bunch of text fields and do crude sentiment analysis or summaries of the individual fields, for example.