AI for spreadsheets and data

Module 1 argued that being excellent at spreadsheets often has more career leverage than half-learned coding. This lesson multiplies that: an AI assistant turns you from someone who knows some formulas into someone who can get almost any formula — because you no longer need to remember syntax, only to describe what you want.

Getting formulas by describing them

The pattern is always the same: describe your layout, describe the result you want, name your tool.

In Google Sheets, column A has student names and column B has scores. Give me a formula for cell D1 that averages the scores of students whose name starts with "A". Explain how it works in one sentence.

Notice the three ingredients: layout (which data is in which column), goal (average, only names starting with A — our old friends Amit, Priya and Sara from Module 1), and tool (Google Sheets and Excel differ in small, maddening ways, so always say which).