Comment by aerosmile

Comment by aerosmile a year ago

6 replies

It’s amazing that Microsoft - given their focus on AI and decades of experience in spreadsheets - doesn’t offer this type of functionality. Corporate bureaucracy vs startup agility!

mceoin a year ago

At risk of poking the bear, they should have done this decades ago. Except for LLMs they have had everything they needed to bundle this stack into a single product solution; this would be much better for users.

And yes! We're definitely of the opinion that as a startup we can outcompete the two trillion-dollar death stars when it comes to product experience. AI is a platform shift!

tellarin a year ago

When I was in there in Microsoft Research, our team was working on related efforts. But, yes, while pieces have shipped into products, MS never released a complete solution at the time.

Some links that might be of interest:

- Table semantics: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/table-inter...

- Entity semantics (video): https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AMIdbT4yVFaw2Kk&cid=A6...

- Natural Language in Spreadsheets: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/gridbook/

  • mceoin a year ago

    Thank you for sharing! Would love to grab a coffee if you're ever in San Francisco. eoin@sourcetable.com

luke-stanley a year ago

Actually Microsoft do now have Copilot and Python in Excel recently released last week. Maybe a bit slow.

  • temac a year ago

    I dont know if the Python in Excel architecture as changed but last time i saw it, it was insane and unusable for me (data sent to MS servers where a linux container executes python: you need both a subscription and that the data in question not be regulated)

  • mceoin a year ago

    Platform wise, the equivalent would be if they combined Excel, PowerBI, Data Factory and Azure into a single tool.

    Technically you can combine these, but it’s a cumbersome experience and difficult for most people. Vertically integrating their equivalents simplifies things a lot.

    (Small note: we don’t currently offer Python to users but likely will at some point)