I’ll be honest. I’ve lost whole afternoons fighting with a VLOOKUP that kept returning #N/A. You squint at the cells, retype the range, and it still won’t work. So when I came across a post from an AI professional who says nobody needs to do this by hand anymore, I paid attention.
The author makes a simple point that I think a lot of people miss. Most of us still do Excel the slow way while AI sits right there, unused. Below I’ll walk through what they shared, plus a step-by-step way to use it in your own spreadsheets starting today.
📊 The Problem the Author Keeps Seeing
The original poster says they see the same scenes over and over:
- Founders spending hours on VLOOKUPs
- Ops teams manually flagging duplicate entries
- Someone re-typing names to merge two columns
Their verdict is blunt: “None of it needs to happen anymore.”
They also share some history. Spreadsheets used to run half the operation: revenue tracking, ranking reps, and flagging outliers before they turned into real problems. Back then, analysts wrote every formula by hand. Now a single prompt does what used to take a full afternoon.
“AI doesn’t just answer questions anymore. It writes the exact formula you need, instantly.”
According to the author, that’s the shift most people haven’t caught up to yet. I agree. The tools are already there. Most people just haven’t changed their habits.
🧰 The 20 Excel Tasks AI Can Handle for You
This industry pro put together 20 prompts that turn Excel into an AI-powered tool. Here’s the full list of what they cover:
- Calculate regional revenue totals in one prompt
- Find and highlight duplicate entries automatically
- Merge first and last names into one column
- Calculate business days, excluding weekends and holidays
- Standardize messy text formatting instantly
- Find peak sales months per product
- Assign letter grades with nested IF logic
- Extract day, month, year from any date
- Replace formula errors with clean values
- Run VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH across sheets
- Build a running total that updates itself
- Count keyword mentions inside longer text strings
- Extract domains from a list of emails
- Convert text-stored numbers into real numbers
- Calculate compound interest in one formula
- Rank data without touching the sort order
- Flag outliers based on percentage thresholds
- Split full addresses into clean columns
- Calculate a weighted average across criteria
- Pull exact values from a pivot table with GETPIVOTDATA
Look at that list again. Almost every item is something people search for on forums, copy a half-working answer, and then tweak for twenty minutes. That’s exactly the time AI gives back.
🪜 How to Put These Prompts to Work, Step by Step
A list of tasks is great, but you still need a process. Here’s how I’d turn the creator’s ideas into a repeatable routine.
- Pick one painful task. Start with whatever eats the most time each week, like merging names or catching duplicates. One quick win builds the habit faster than trying all 20 at once.
- Describe your data layout. Tell the AI which columns hold what, for example “First names are in column A, last names in column B, starting at row 2.” Clear cell references are the difference between a formula that works and one that breaks.
- State the exact outcome. Say what the result should look like, such as “one column with full names separated by a space.” The more specific the target, the less you’ll need to fix later.
- Mention your Excel version. Newer versions support functions like XLOOKUP and TEXTSPLIT, while older ones don’t. Adding this detail stops the AI from suggesting formulas your setup can’t run.
- Test on a small sample first. Paste the formula into a few rows and check the results by hand. If something’s off, tell the AI what went wrong and ask for a fix.
- Ask for an explanation. A quick “explain how this formula works” turns each prompt into a mini lesson. Over time you’ll spot errors faster and write better prompts.
- Save your winners. Keep a simple prompt library in a doc or a spare tab. The author’s advice to “save this” applies to your own best prompts too.
💡 Prompt of the Day
Here’s how one item from the list might look as a real prompt, built with the steps above:
“I have customer emails in column C, starting at C2. Write an Excel formula for column D that extracts only the domain after the @ sign. I’m using Excel 365. Then explain how the formula works.”
You can use the same pattern for the others. Swap in your columns, your goal, and your version. For example: “Rank the sales values in column F from highest to lowest without changing the row order,” or “Replace any formula errors in column H with a zero.”
🎯 Where This Pays Off Most
Some teams feel the difference right away:
- Founders: faster revenue rollups by region without waiting on an analyst
- Ops teams: automatic duplicate checks and cleaner imported data
- Sales managers: rep rankings and peak-month reports in minutes
- Finance folks: compound interest, weighted averages, and business-day counts without formula hunting
This ties into a much bigger trend. AI assistants are now built into spreadsheet tools, and chat assistants can write formulas on demand. Excel stays useful no matter what. What’s changing is how fast you can get things done in it.
As the expert puts it: “None of this is complicated once you know what to ask for. The skill isn’t Excel anymore. It’s knowing how to prompt it.”
I really like that framing. You don’t need to memorize hundreds of functions. You need to describe your problem clearly, and AI handles the syntax.
The author also suggests sending this to the teammate who’s still doing it the slow way, and asks which prompt you’re trying first. My pick is the error cleanup, because those #N/A cells drive me nuts.
Check out the full LinkedIn post to see the complete set of prompts and join the conversation.