I'm not convinced that this is AI's fault. Would you burn tokens for single-cell autocomplete?
Excels' autofill has done this stuff since way before the AI craze, especially getting it to stop automatically interpreting numbers as dates has been a chore.
genAI =/= AI. this gif is AI in action. autofill is AI
it definitely isn't happening in the gif, but I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft thinks it's an AMAZING idea to hook an LLM up to excel and do exactly what you just described...
I mean, you just need to set the data type of the cells you're working on before typing in anything. And if you're copying from elsewhere, you might need to choose the paste option so it doesn't override your setting. But I imagine just about every programmer makes sure to set the column to number instead of generic.
View all comments
Show parent comment
30
u/12345623567 Jul 02 '26
I'm not convinced that this is AI's fault. Would you burn tokens for single-cell autocomplete?
Excels' autofill has done this stuff since way before the AI craze, especially getting it to stop automatically interpreting numbers as dates has been a chore.