(Design: Lily Yeh | Image Credit: MASTER/Getty Images/OpenAI/Google)
There's no escaping spreadsheets. Tools like Excel and Google Sheets are ubiquitous these days, and learning how to use them more effectively will quickly enhance your daily work. But spreadsheets aren't always the easiest thing to work with. Grids of numbers, obscure menus, arcane formula syntax -- it can leave you feeling lost and overwhelmed. That's the bad news.
The good news? I've figured out how to harness AI to make Excel and Google Sheets much easier to work with. And I'm not talking about specialized plug-ins or spreadsheet-specific apps. Standard (and free) AI tools can give you a major leg up. I've been using my newfound spreadsheet superpowers to do everything from planning birthday dinners to automating work tasks and diving deeper into advanced features in Google Sheets.
Here are my three favorite basic ways to level up your spreadsheet game with ChatGPT. You can use basic chatbots to effortlessly get structured data from almost any source, use AI as your personal formula generator, and even get personalized tutorials and guidance for mastering advanced features.
Choosing Your AI Spreadsheet Assistant
For this project I'm using Google Sheets for my spreadsheet work and ChatGPT for AI assistance. But I regularly use other tools, like Google Gemini, and the same techniques apply. In fact, these tips will also work with other Anthropic's Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and others.
This guide also isn't limited to Google Sheets, since the same general approach works for Microsoft Excel and even more specialized tools like Microsoft Access.
While sophisticated, purpose-built AI tools and even integrated AI features within Excel and Google Sheets exist (topics for another time), it's impressive how even these free chatbots can really elevate your everyday spreadsheet use.
Right now, I'm using ChatGPT because it's the most popular AI tool out there, but you can get even more out of your spreadsheets when used synergistically with the right chatbot: If you're an Excel user, Microsoft Copilot delivers even more capability, while Google's Gemini is the best tool for enhancing Google Sheets. We'll address those specific tools in future articles but know that what we're looking at here is just scratching the surface.
Stepping Up My Spreadsheet Game With Google Sheets and ChatGPT
While I do not do financial analysis or data science as a writer for PCMag, I do deal with a fair amount of data. From test results to traffic reports -- not to mention researching new stories and staying up to date on academic studies around AI and other tech topics -- it's not unusual for me to have to dig through some numbers now and then.
I've also found ways to speed up my data entry with a couple of handy automations that pull specific bits of information from a website or parse extra-long URLs to let me quickly grab product photos from an article when I need to reuse them elsewhere. But all of those tools require complex functions that, in all honesty, I don't want to figure out from scratch.
AI has enhanced all of that, so let's explore the three most basic ways ChatGPT can help you do more with spreadsheets.
1. Get Structured Data From Any Source
One of my favorite uses for tools like ChatGPT is to take data from one source and turn it into a structured table or list. That sort of data manipulation can be grueling when done manually, but AI can do it quickly and accurately, letting you automate data entry and skip that step entirely.
For example, I recently planned a birthday dinner for someone who loves sushi. But as anyone who knows their sashimi from their wasabi can tell you, bites of fish and rice get pricey. Putting the sushi selection and pricing details into a spreadsheet could make it easier to track who wanted what, how much, and what it would all cost.
But first, I'd need to get all of that delicious data into spreadsheet format. I don't love sushi (or spreadsheets) enough to do all of that manually. Thankfully, ChatGPT is pretty great at taking data from one format (be it plaintext or a PDF) and outputting it as another.
In this example, all I had to do was download the menu from the restaurant's website, upload it to ChatGPT, and specifically ask for a table that included all of the items on the sushi menu, with price information.
It took a little tweaking to get things just how I wanted them, including details like whether it was priced per roll or per piece, but in short order, I had a nicely formatted table of menu items and prices.
Copying and pasting into Google Sheets was a cinch. And here's a bonus tip: Pasting with CTRL+V might result in some funky data formatting. Instead, use CTRL+Shift+V to get tables to paste cleanly. (And for a real upgrade, you can do all of this with Google Gemini, and then output the resulting table directly to your Drive as a Google Sheet.)
This works for more than just semi-structured restaurant menus and PDF files. You can do the same thing for plaintext lists, photos of whiteboards, scans of old book pages, almost anything. The output format can be as simple or complex as you want. You can output as a table or CSV or use structured formats like JSON or XML.
In this case, while copy and paste would do the job just fine, I also wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to output something to a CSV file.
If you're unfamiliar, CSV stands for "Comma-separated values" and is a plaintext file format for storing tabular data -- literally tables of text and numbers. II's a file format that's supported by both Excel and Google Sheets, so even huge reports can be opened as a clean spreadsheet.
As for the data in CSV format, just copy and paste the resulting text into a text file and change the file extension from .txt to .csv. Now, it can be easily opened in Excel or Google Sheets with proper table formatting, ready to be used however you need.
2. The Three Fs: Formulas, Formatting, and Features
Once you have your data, AI can also help you wrangle it. While you can use AI to do some data analysis, I find it's much better to just let AI assist me with building out my spreadsheets the way I want, using ChatGPT as an AI Excel formula generator.
Excel and Google Sheets formulas hit a sweet spot for tools like ChatGPT, where there's a ton of consistent and helpful instructional material on the topic in their training data. It's a mix of language and straightforward logic, making it easy for the AI to understand the tools and the syntax that often leaves human users scratching their heads. The result is even better: instant, copy-and-paste solutions.
There are a ton of different ways to leverage this faculty with formulas. Here are just a few examples of the prompts I've found useful in my own work, starting with simple formulas.
As you can see, these formulas work for handling math and logic, but also extracting information, whether it's grabbing domain names from email addresses or sifting through text for numbers.
That same formula-writing capability is great for setting up more sophisticated conditional formatting rules:
All you need to do is explain what you want the rule to do, and ChatGPT can figure out the formatting rule formulas for you, and even walk you through how to set up your custom formatting.
And it goes the other direction, too. Not only can ChatGPT write formulas based on your plain English explanation of what you want it to do, but it can also break down what a complex formula does and walk you through the individual functions and variables. It's a great resource for learning formula syntax, but also for troubleshooting a formula that isn't working.
Whether you need it for writing formulas, crafting rules for conditional formatting, explaining a formula you might not understand, or debugging a formula that's causing trouble, ChatGPT becomes your AI spreadsheet wingman.
3. Learn Excel With AI: Your Personal VLOOKUP Tutorial and More
ChatGPT is also super-effective as a tutor for learning advanced features in Google Sheets and Excel. For all the same reasons that an AI chatbot is great at writing formulas, they're also well-equipped to teach you how to do things in your favorite spreadsheet app.
What's the feature you've always thought would be useful but never really understood? Maybe it's Excel Macros or Google Sheets App Script. Maybe you feel intimidated by Regex, pivot tables, or VLOOKUP. Whatever it is, your AI tool of choice can probably help you learn it, and quickly.
Now, you always have the option of looking up tutorial videos or digging through FAQs and help forums. There are even Excel tutors and courses that offer premium instruction on any aspect of the app you want to learn.
But ChatGPT is also pretty great, and can do it for free. And it will do more than just regurgitate information; you can ask questions, get clarifications, and ask for step-by-step instructions when needed. You can also use it to create custom learning plans, make tutorials that solve your real-world problems and projects, and answer your questions over and over and over again. Unlike a human, AI won't grow impatient when you get stuck.
Honestly, the best feature of using AI for learning is that it's endlessly patient and flexible. You can ask it anything, no matter how simple, complex, or specific to your exact use.
For example, I needed to brush up on Google Sheets' ImportXML function to update several tools I use to grab product data as part of my work. So I used an extremely simple prompt to go over the basics:
In response, ChatGPT walked me through the essential information about how ImportXML functions work, the nuances of Xpath usage, and the syntax of the formula structure used.
And this isn't limited to any one function or feature. You can rinse and repeat to learn any aspect of Google Sheets or Excel, or all of them. You can even ask ChatGPT to put together a learning plan to boost your spreadsheet knowledge across the board.
Smarter Spreadsheets for Your Daily Life
These same uses can help you level up your own daily work in all sorts of ways. Whether you're assembling data for a weekly report, analyzing information to find actionable insights, or mining old content for new data, your use of spreadsheet tools can be simpler, faster, and more insightful.
And we've only scratched the surface. Consider experimenting with using AI to go beyond basic formulas. The ability to use natural, conversational language to write complex formulas and fine-tune the more advanced features of modern spreadsheets is powerful. Even casually including your preferred chatbot in your daily work leverages AI productivity to make you faster and more efficient and unlock new ways to explore data for unexpected insights.
But that doesn't mean that these lessons need to stay office-bound. AI can make Excel and Google Sheets so much more accessible, and you can leverage that in your daily life in creative ways:
And the broader lessons from these tips apply elsewhere. The same AI that can explain Excel formulas and teach you advanced features can be used to troubleshoot a Python script or quickly master the shortcuts in Adobe Photoshop.
Personalized tutoring on things like Pivot Tables and ImportXML functions can also be applied to other subjects and skills. AI like ChatGPT is a hugely powerful learning tool and one that can be tailored to you, your projects, and your needs in any combination.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
