How AI Made Me an Excel Wizard

When AI first dropped, I definitely had a holier-than-thou attitude.

Maybe it was too many movies where AI goes rogue (I’m looking at you, Terminator), or the fact that it couldn’t write with as much vigour as my guy Hunter Thompson – I just couldn’t see its value. It couldn’t edit as well as I could, and it was easier to write copy on my own than proof its schlock – after all, there’s no way it could understand my voice better than me or know what’s in my head!

But AI wasn’t the problem, it was me! I wasn’t giving it the context needed to do any real, good work.

My opinion changed when I talked with AI about my gripes with The Dark Night Rises (Batman and Bruce should’ve died at the end, the whole trilogy was building to it).

That’s because this was the first time I had a conversation with the thing rather than simply prompt it to do something for me. Ideas flowed, and I even gained some new perspective on Nolan’s films, all thanks to AI’s insights and ability to read context and build off what I was saying.

Without a final goal in mind and a full scope of the project, AI doesn’t have all the information it needs to do an adequate job.

How AI Turned Me Into an Excel Expert

At the beginning of this year, I took on a project I had no business getting into. Our email marketing contacts needed a cleanup, so I promised to take a crack at it and get our email marketing database back on track.

For context, I have no formal email marketing or Excel training, but email marketing has always been our most important marketing tool, so I felt it was important to get our system working again. It wasn’t producing the results we had come to expect, and after some digging, it turns out some connections to our other systems were broken and we were missing valuable pieces of data. This missing data was what we needed to properly segment our contacts and make sure we’re sending relevant training info to the right people. My hope was that cleaning the database and its connections to our other systems would bring things back to where they were.

It worked! And it’s all thanks to AI.

Sure, I certainly had a hand in things, and I worked with an outside consultant to come up with the initial plan, but cleaning the actual data was a collaborative effort between myself and AI.

Here’s the main thing I learned:

Give as much context as possible.

Without a final goal in mind and a full scope of the project, AI doesn’t have all the information it needs to do an adequate job. For example, if you’re asking AI to draft an email, start by telling it who the audience is and the intended purpose of the message. You can even get more niche by giving it examples of what you’d like it to do, saying what tone you’d like it to use, word count, etc.

AI thrives on context – the more you give it, the better your results will be.

Cleaning our email data meant I had to pull all our contacts from our website and email marketing program, and then consolidate the data in Excel in order to fill in the info we were missing. Here’s an example from one of my prompts for AI that I used in this project:

I’ve got a bit of an excel pickle – a briny one. I have a list of all our email newsletter signups I pulled from our website. There are 2069 duplicate records, and there are four columns that indicate which of our marketing materials they’d like to receive. Some of the emails are duplicated more than twice. Some of these duplicate emails/rows have different signup info than others. For example, there’s one email that’s duplicated 5x and has indicated Training and Blogs in one row, and Free Resources and Podcast in another. Can you think of how I can consolidate these duplicate rows/emails into one row that accounts for all the signups indicated in rows J-M?

After some back and forth in which I gave more context, AI came up this formula:

=IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(D2, PULLER!$A$1:$A$2726, 0)), IF(ISBLANK(INDEX(PULLER!$C$1:$C$2726, MATCH(D2, PULLER!$A$1:$A$2726, 0))), “”, INDEX(PULLER!$C$1:$C$2726, MATCH(D2, PULLER!$A$1:$A$2726, 0))), “”)

Do you see how long that formula is?! There’s no way I could have come up with that on my own. And this is just a small example of the formulas I used to fill in our missing data. It was many weeks of prompts, trial, and error. If a formula AI gave me didn’t work, I would explain what did happen, and it would adjust the formula based on that info.

Get creative about what AI could help you with.

Rather than using AI to create art (to put it bluntly, it does a horrendous job of this), consider your daily tasks or problems you often have, and let it do the brunt of the work!

As a training organization, it’s really helpful to know the latest workplace trends and what our audience is talking about. And who better to ask than AI!

Examples of What I’ve Used AI for Recently

Reworking Sentences in My Copy

Editing is one of my main tasks, and sometimes at the end of the day, I just can’t anymore. My mind’s mush, and sentences seem to have lost all meaning. But if I’m struggling with the syntax of something I’m proofing, or just want to reduce the use of a repeated word, I’ll plunk the text into AI and ask it to do just that. Make sure you read what it wrote before incorporating, but typically it gets me most of the way there.

Giving Notes on Brand Voice

With Copilot in particular, you can give AI your website and ask it to assess your brand voice. This is helpful if you’re new to writing for your organization or are rethinking how you write copy.

Market Research

As a training organization, it’s really helpful to know the latest workplace trends and what our audience is talking about. And who better to ask than AI! It can do a much quicker job of synthesizing this info than we can.

Tech Troubleshooting

Anytime I have something odd happen with my software, I turn to AI. To me, it’s always better if I can solve something on my own and know how to navigate the issue in the future.

AI is here to stay, and honestly, I’m more than okay with that. It’s made my job a whole lot easier, and I’m excited to see what it’ll be able to do next!