I still remember watching a friend spend an entire afternoon building one VLOOKUP by hand. Type, error, retype, error again. It hurt to watch. So when I came across this post from a savvy LinkedIn creator, it hit a nerve. The original poster puts it bluntly: most people are still doing Excel manually while AI sits right there, unused.
The post’s author says they see it constantly. Founders burning hours on VLOOKUPs. Ops teams manually flagging duplicate entries. Someone retyping names just to merge two columns. And the kicker, in the creator’s words, is that none of it needs to happen anymore.
The shift most people haven’t caught up to
The expert paints a quick before-and-after picture. Spreadsheets used to run half the operation: revenue tracking, ranking reps, flagging outliers before they became real problems. Back then, analysts wrote every formula by hand. Now a single prompt does what used to take a full afternoon.
The idea that stuck with me is simple. AI doesn’t just answer questions anymore. It writes the exact formula you need, instantly. I think that’s why so many of us are still stuck: we treat AI like a search engine when it’s actually a formula engine sitting one tab away.
The 20 prompts, with a bit of substance
The creator put together 20 prompts that turn Excel into an AI-powered tool and told readers to save the list because they’ll come back to it. The original post lists them as one-liners. I’ve added a short note on why each one matters, so you can pick the one that fixes your biggest headache first.
- Calculate regional revenue totals in one prompt. Ask for totals by region and you skip the whole filter-copy-sum routine. One SUMIFS-style formula and you’re done.
- Find and highlight duplicate entries automatically. The AI hands you a conditional formatting rule, so double entries light up on their own instead of hiding in row 847.
- Merge first and last names into one column. A simple join formula generated in seconds. No more retyping 300 names by hand.
- Calculate business days, excluding weekends and holidays. There’s a function for this, but you don’t need to remember its name. Just describe what you want and the formula shows up.
- Standardize messy text formatting instantly. Extra spaces, random capitals, weird characters from a CRM export. One prompt cleans the whole column.
- Find peak sales months per product. Tells you exactly when each product spikes, which is gold for planning inventory and promos.
- Assign letter grades with nested IF logic. Nested IFs are painful to type by hand. The AI writes the whole chain without a single missing parenthesis.
- Extract day, month, year from any date. Pulls each piece into its own column so you can group and filter by any of them.
- Replace formula errors with clean values. Those #N/A cells that break your charts and totals? Wrapped and handled in one go.
- Run VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH across sheets. The classic. Tell the AI which sheet holds what, and it builds the cross-reference for you.
- Build a running total that updates itself. Every new row extends the total automatically. No dragging formulas down each week.
- Count keyword mentions inside longer text strings. Perfect for survey answers or support tickets. Find out how often “refund” shows up without reading every line.
- Extract domains from a list of emails. Everything after the @ symbol, which makes grouping leads by company trivial.
- Convert text-stored numbers into real numbers. The silent killer of broken sums. One formula and your totals finally add up.
- Calculate compound interest in one formula. Principal, rate, periods, done. No financial calculator required.
- Rank data without touching the sort order. Your rows stay where they are, and a new column tells you who’s first, second, third.
- Flag outliers based on percentage thresholds. Anything more than X percent off the average gets a flag before it turns into a real problem.
- Split full addresses into clean columns. Street, city, state, zip, each in its own column instead of hours of copy-paste.
- Calculate a weighted average across criteria. The kind of formula people botch by hand all the time. Generated correctly the first time.
- Pull exact values from a pivot table with GETPIVOTDATA. Grab one specific number from a pivot without clicking around or breaking references.
How to get the most out of these
The creator makes a point I fully agree with: none of this is complicated once you know what to ask for. A few habits I picked up that make the prompts work even better:
- Describe your columns. Tell the AI what’s in column A, B and C. It writes cleaner formulas when it knows the layout.
- Paste a few sample rows. Real data beats a vague description every time.
- Ask it to explain the formula. You’ll learn something, and you’ll catch mistakes faster.
- Test on a copy first. Especially for anything that touches revenue numbers.
Why this matters beyond Excel
The skill isn’t Excel anymore. It’s knowing how to prompt it.
That line from the post’s author is the real takeaway. It’s not about Excel at all. The same shift is happening with SQL, with slide decks, with email. The person who can describe a problem clearly gets the answer in seconds. The person who memorized the syntax is still typing.
I was honestly a little embarrassed reading this, because I’ve done at least five of these the slow way in the past month alone. Not anymore!
The creator closes with a challenge I’ll pass along: send this to the teammate still doing it the slow way. And tell me, which one of these are you trying first? Head over to the full LinkedIn post to see the original list and join the conversation.