Using Agent Mode in my project

Today’s post will be a brief review of my attempt to use Agent Mode during a project that I was doing for someone. I may have already mentioned the exploration, but I thought I would go over it again as part of the series of review of what I learned while doing a project.

I had been doing the project for a couple of weeks before Agent Mode appeared to be available for Excel.

The First Video about Agent Mode

I’m trying to remember the day. I do remember being stuck on developing a formula to backtrack to an answer. I was starting to worry.

So, I took a walking break and then did a brief look up of the news. I go to YouTube to see if any striking news has been reported while I was focused on the project.

There’s a guy, Nate B. Jones, whose discussions on AI I follow. His channel is called “AI News and Strategy Daily”. He can sometimes get very technical for me and so his stuff goes right over my head. And he talks fast.

That afternoon one of his videos titled “Excel AI will replace finance teams by 2026 – Here’s why (and what to do)” showed up in my feed.

Okay, this one I had to see.

He was actually talking about Claude being able to manipulate Excel files, but he did mention that Microsoft had something for Excel. Claude was better but Microsoft had something serviceable.

I went looking for more videos on this topic and found a few where I learned that Agent Mode can be accessed via an add-in. You had to subscribe to Microsoft 365 AND also subscribe to CoPilot. (I was already subscribing to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft increased the annual subscription price automatically when my time was up).

Unfortunately, I had to go to some meetings so I could not explore adding in the Agent Mode.

Exploring Agent Mode

That night, when I finished all of the meetings, I settled down to add in the Agent Mode.

At the time, I didn’t know how to bring in add-ins from the web browser, but since then I have learned that there is a way of bringing in add-in apps. Look for the following icon on the toolbar, on the right side of the screen:

To search for the Agent Mode, you can use the following search phrases: agent mode, Excel Labs, Microsoft garage. One of those three will bring up Excel Lab’s Agent Mode.

Once you have it installed, there is one other thing you need to know: to use Agent Mode, you have to do it on the web, not from your desktop app. This might be a way of preventing the app from reading your hard drive or it might be easier for the app to read what is in your OneDrive.

Once I got the Agent Mode installed, the first thing I asked Agent Mode t do was to create the formula to solve the problem I was working on.

And DANG, about 7 minutes later it had the formula laid out for me. I learned about the LET function.

I tested it several times and it worked.

I did do a test where I asked Agent Mode to create a file in its entirety to do the project I was doing, and it did it. It looked like it did a serviceable job of it although I didn’t do a full-scale testing.

What I learned about Agent Mode

Here’s a couple of things I picked up:

• It can produce a very rudimentary file to solve whatever you are trying to do: income statement, balance sheet, retirement calculations, etc. Anything that the web has a lot of blogs on the topic.
• It can solve formulas, probably so long as the problem exists out on the web.
• It is not good for design work. If something doesn’t exist out on the web, Agent Mode cannot do something new.
• It is very good at suggesting other approaches in analyzing the set up. It offered other exciting solutions to explore.

Regarding the last item, I was trying to develop a spreadsheet that didn’t look like a spreadsheet because of the end user. End users may detest spreadsheets.

When my prompts concerned design work, Agent Mode always answered with something that still reeked of spreadsheet. Even when I asked it to design the spreadsheet like Jony Ives would, it still came back with a spreadsheet look.

Agent Mode could not help me in designing a spreadsheet for a particular end user.

It is likely that Agent Mode also can’t do highly complicated situations with nuances, just based upon the findings of the Mod Squad Pod.

Who is in danger from Agent Mode?

Any third-party vendors developing AI tools to embed within Excel could be in danger. The Mod Squad reported that one of the vendors they had a relationship with already closed their doors because investors pulled out their money.

Anybody who was developing spreadsheets for others. Agent Mode might now be able to develop the spreadsheets for FREE.

BUT, if your job did not include constantly creating spreadsheets, then you might be okay. Your job consisted of other activities besides constantly creating spreadsheets; maybe you act as a partner to the business and provide insights.

Conclusion

Going forward, I will start using this Agent Mode to speed up the development process; however, I will have to develop testing techniques. Using Agent Mode could help me learn new functions or provide me time to analyze.