Excel’s Analyze Data

There has been a lot of rush amongst companies to embed some kind of AI intelligence similar to ChatGPT, but it looks like Excel already had something like it for about 2 years.

It started out life as “Ideas” and is now called “Analyze Data” and is found on the Home page. You can ask it questions and it will give you answers, maybe in the form of charts or some numerical result. Or if you don’t know what to ask, you can ask it to tell you the most important information that it can extract from a table of data or any outliers.

That “Analyze Data” can save you time because it can spot right away what you need to know.

I’ve been warning about the automation stuff for years and this “Analyze Data” is a form of automation: automatic pattern detection, automatic outlier detection, automatic graphing of important trends.

Yes, it can save you time, but it can also save the end user of your analysis/reporting time. They can now do the analysis themselves because it has become easier with a guide such as “Analyze Data”. It’s going to come down to whether they decide to do the analysis themselves because Excel has become so easy to use or whether they still don’t want to deal with the spreadsheets and will still offload the chore to you.

Will corporations approach this new development like the secretaries of yore when less and less secretaries were needed because executives thought that people had Word to write their own letters or documents? We don’t have secretaries anymore; we have software instead.

Will your analytical job go the route of secretaries or will end users realize that they prefer to offload the chore to you?

Or will shareholders demand lower labor costs, driving executives to reduce headcounts of analysts and force other users to use the “Analyze Data” feature of Excel?

I don’t know how this will turn out, but we must always be ready with new skills. We need to understand how to use these automation tools so we can use it to our advantage.

Hopefully, most people don’t want to do the analysis themselves and will hand it over to you, but we can’t rely on that. There are the shareholders.

Here are two videos pertaining to Excel’s Analyze Data which is part of Office 365, so if you do NOT have a subscription service, you won’t have it.

This first one is Kevin Stratvert’s video:

This other video is by Leila Gharani and is actually 2 years old. At that time the feature was called “Ideas” which was later changed to “Analyze Data”. Again, all of this is found on the Home page.