303
Microsoft Is Retiring Excel’s COPILOT() Function After Just One Year
(windowsreport.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
303 points (99.3% liked)
Fuck AI
8755 readers
1670 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Rules:
- Relevant posts only.
- No bigotry.
- No misinformation.
- No NSFW/NSFL content without being labeled NSFW or being in an appropriately-labeled spoiler tag.
- This isn't a place to talk about the cons and (supposed) pros of AI for different use cases. This is /c/fuck_ai .
- Especially no AI advocacy.
- No AI-generated content. If you want to post examples of AI failing hillariously, there are other communities for that like !ArtificialIgnorance@lemmy.ca .
- Venting is part of the purpose of this community, but don't aim frustration or accusations at other users.
- These rules are a living document that may change in the future.
You can help the mod team by making your reports detailed.
Effective reports:
- "The third image is a well-known anti-semitic trope"
- "Claiming that 'agentic AI' can outperform humans at all jobs is misinformation"
Less effective reports:
- "Breaks rules"
- "Misinformation"
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Ah yes, those idiots trying to do math in Excel.
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.I remember in 8th grade about 26 years ago being taught how to use Microsoft Works, including its word processor, spreadsheet, and its database.
Yeah for those who think it's a new problem for Microsoft to have multiple teams working on different overlapping projects, they've been doing that shit since at least the 90's. At one point in time they had at least three word processors in active development: MS Word, MS Works, and Wordpad.
MS Works was kind of MS Office Junior. It was packaged as one app instead of a bundle of several but you'd choose which function you'd want to use right now. It had a spreadsheet and the main difference between it and Excel was you were limited to one worksheet. And it had a database function which visually looked a lot like a spreadsheet, nothing like Access. Good enough for Dad to catalog his VHS collection. Except they stopped supporting works years ago, I think Word and Excel can open Works files but I don't know about Works database files are rather esoteric now. Then there's MS Access which is itself being killed off.
There's a rather big gulf between "just slightly misuse Excel" and "learn SQL."
Idiots using a function without understanding what it actually does. Plenty of functions in Excel operate on text.