Swipe These Prompts

Here are the prompts used in the presentation:

<aside> 💡 I don’t know much about pivot tables. Explain them to me like I’m 15 years old.

</aside>

Ideas

ChatGPT can truly be your best friend when it comes to going deeper with Excel. Here are some ideas for tasks it can help you with:

  1. Understand a formula - Provide a formula to ChatGPT that someone else has written, and ask ChatGPT to explain how it works.
  2. Modify a complex formula - Provide an existing formula, narratively explain how you would like to modify it, to have it create a new formula.
  3. Create a new formula - Explain the problem you have, including sample data, and have it write the formula for you.
  4. Create a better formula - Impress your friends by improving upon their formula with a more elegant, or needlessly complex alternative formula.
  5. Write a VBA script - Explain what you’d like the script to accomplish, taking care to specifically identify the cells and sheet names you want to be modified.
  6. Debug a VBA script - Provide it with an existing script that isn’t working, or needs to be altered.
  7. Advanced pivot tables - If you’re bad at pivot tables like me, provide it with some example data, and ask it to walk you through how to set up the pivot table.
  8. Figure out what Power Query does - Because who actually knows.

Best Practices

Early on I struggled to get helpful Excel tips out of ChatGPT, and realized it’s because I wasn’t providing enough information about the underlying data. Formulas & scripts require knowledge of the data structure in order for cell references to be correct.