Excel Labs is an Office Add-in for Excel that allows the Excel team to release experimental Excel features and gather customer feedback about them. Although some of these features may never be incorporated into Excel, this experimentation and feedback is vital.
Excel Labs currently includes two features:
- Advanced formula environment: An interface designed for authoring, editing, and reusing formulas.
LABS.GENERATIVEAI: A custom function that enables you to send prompts to a generative AI model and return the responses directly to the grid. This is not part of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The Microsoft Garage is an outlet for experimental projects for you to try.
Advanced formula environment makes it easy to create, edit, and reuse formulas and named LAMBDA functions.
While Excel Name Manager lets you name and reuse any formula, including functions defined with LAMBDA, the interface makes it difficult to author these formulas. Common features that make programming easier are missing, such as immediate inline errors and syntax highlighting. Advanced formula environment fills this gap. It’s an interface for the Excel Name Manager that is designed for formula authoring. Using the advanced formula environment, you can:
- Write formulas using an editor that supports inline errors, IntelliSense, comments, and more.
- Indent formulas, making them easier to read.
- Edit modules of named formulas using a single code editor.
- Quickly reuse LAMBDA formulas by importing them from GitHub gists, or by copying them for other workbooks.
See Advanced formula environment for more information.
With the announcement of Microsoft 365 Copilot, we see great potential in the power of generative AI. LABS.GENERATIVEAI is a custom function that enables you to send prompts to a generative AI model and return the responses to the Excel grid.
Using this function, you can test the benefits of generative AI directly in Excel. LABS.GENERATIVEAI is not part of Microsoft 365 Copilot but rather a place for you to play and experiment with generative AI today within the Garage framework.
LABS.GENERATIVEAI allows you to send simple or complex prompts to a generative AI model, such as requests to:
- Analyze public information.
- Process data and define the format.
- Answer factual or creative questions.
- Produce a response based on a sample.
LABS.GENERATIVEAI allows you to reference other cells in your workbook, and it can be called inside any Excel cell or named formula in the workbook.
See LABS.GENERATIVEAI for more information.
Excel Labs works in Excel for Desktop, Mac, and on the web, without installing any additional software. To get started, install the add-in from the Office Store.
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.
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