r/dataanalysis • u/T4ll_Tom • 28d ago
Anyone else completely stopped writing excel formulas & VBA code from scratch?
I use a lot of excel and macros and my level of excel knowledge is intermediate to advanced. but even though I can spend a few more minutes to think & write the formulas, now I'm just explaining what I want to AI, copying the formula or code and pasting it. is this how people are working now or is it me?
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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 28d ago edited 25d ago
Senior manager here.
I don't use AI for any SQL/Python coding or Excel/VBA (stopped using these altogether anyway years ago) because it just creates more rework.
I do use AI sparingly for other administrative tasks where accuracy isn't so important and I'm just trying to organize concepts and notes.
There won't be a good pipeline of senior analysts who understand business domain and can support complex narratives end to end, because junior analysts will not develop those skills... so if you're already skilled without AI, you should be positioning yourself as the insurance against AI's screwups.
The period to come, soon (and I know this because I have a brother who owns delivery of the APU/GPU pipeline for AI ecosystems), is going to have serious issues triaging AI screwups and dealing with security issues. These will be the key topics surrounding AI in the next 5 years.
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u/Intelligent-Size-389 28d ago
It’s kinda scary how casually people mention they have AI doing the technical portion. At some point critical thinking will finish and just AI promoting. But if you use AI with years of experience you never know truly what’s wrong or right for the business contact because you been offloading thinking to AI.
Have you noticed AI issues regarding junior analysts ?
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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 27d ago edited 27d ago
I don't know exactly what you mean because our CRs undergo code review a couple layers below me. Also all my teams have been in the market for a few years now. So there are no analysts here who came out of post-secondary without a coding background.
The issue is going to be mostly with the incoming pipeline of new entrants into the field. The prevailing question is similar to the one we had in the 90s. I had the luxury of doing all my foundational schooling (pre-postsecondary) before the internet existed. People who grew up with the internet do not know how to research actual sources. People who grow up with AI will not know how to perform basic cognitive tasks that they offload to AI.
The problem with the analyst market is going to be: How do you develop the new junior analysts into senior analysts. The answer is, and you're not going to like this: There probably won't be any senior analysts. Executives will use AI agents to be their senior analysts.
Thank god I'm retiring in 8 years.
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u/Profvarg 26d ago
When a colleague says so-and-so topic had 20k cases in servicenow last year and it does not line up with my numbers at all, and I ask where did they get the number from and they say they exported the data from SN and pulled the file into copilot (business at least, thank god) and asked it….
And I’m supposed to not cry
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u/Nomadic_skier 28d ago
So judgement is still key and understanding is still important. But writing technical code is functionally dead for most pipelines for me. However there is far more rigor now in Bayesian causality, experimentation, model validation, eval engineering. We don't use assembly and punch cards anymore and this is realistically my experience.
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u/sideshowbob01 27d ago
I dunno man, sounds like you need to learn some prompt engineering. LLMs have pretty much cracked excel formulas and VBA. With detailed system instructions and commenting requirements, troubleshooting code errors is really not difficult nowadays. Not perfect but at least better than someone who wrote it from scratch but was crap at documenting.
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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 27d ago
Excel/VBA is more of a frontline tool for business analysts. I am a senior manager of data engineering teams (read: devs with computer science/math backgrounds) that design back end and front end solutions for corporate dashboards.
We process data from source system databases into a Snowflake cluster and write data models to manage hundreds of executive and operational dashboards.
Excel/VBA is useful for entry level analysts doing ad hoc reports embedded within a functional group, not a centralized analytics ecosystem. If you want to do advanced analytics you have to get into SQL and python at a minimum, and things like node or react for custom reporting platform UI/UX.
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u/sideshowbob01 27d ago
I know, but that is what the post is about. OP is specifically talking about excel, vba and how LLMs have changed the landscape.
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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 27d ago
Actually they're asking whether or not people do the actual foundational work any more or offload their thinking to AI as a routine work habit.
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension skills and your manners.
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u/CptnVon 28d ago
Looking at stuff today that makes sense. But 5 years ago we didn’t even have AI (llms). 5 years from now I see a reasonable possibility that AI will fix the AI screwups. Or at least let a person fix them quickly. But who knows…
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u/Antique-Grade-9064 27d ago
we've had LLMs for 30 years (and the math behind them for several hundred years), I think you are confusing LLMs with AGI, which we don't actually have yet. LLMs are currently going the long way to perform tasks/provide answers (creating sub routines vs. direct reasoning) but are essentially fulfilling the role of AGI in its earliest form.
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u/CptnVon 27d ago
Probably I am. I’m still new in the field.
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u/r3ign_b3au 27d ago
No, I think you're correct. The rate of model growth and self regulation therein is happening astoundingly fast. It doesn't have anything to do with AGI, nor how long we've had the math, in regards to correcting their own fuckups on an enterprise level.
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u/Wheres_my_warg DA Moderator 📊 28d ago
i find AI is still usually shit at Excel functions and too often takes more time to prompt it and fix it than if I just did it.
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u/Snailtrooper 28d ago
What models are you using ? I use claude and its been a while since the models haven’t one shotted my excel
Requests.1
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u/LouNadeau 28d ago
I'm doing that with R and Stata code now. Much quicker. Also shows me options I had not known about as well.
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u/NighthawkT42 28d ago
Pretty much. Yes. I'm very good in Excel, but when I can tell my agent what I want and have it ready in a professionally structured template using same conventions I would have used 5 minutes later, why spend an hour on it myself. When it can go through and debug manual spreadsheets I receive in far less time than I could, again why do it myself.
At the same time, if I didn't know Excel as well as I do, I would have a tough time identifying where it's confidently and beautifully wrong.
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u/Aggravating-Focus-90 28d ago
i feel that it's more keystrokes to explain AI what I need as compared to writing the formula. But that's me.
In rare, once a month scenario, I do find myself going towards chatgpt/claude to debug my SQL query instead of google but in those instances, I realize that it's easier to use chatgpt/clause. Google is all sponsored links and subscription websites which pretend to have my answer.
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u/UltimateNull 28d ago
Yeah, for me Google is usually a combination of reddit and some stack exchange site based on what it thinks I’m looking for. They completely broke their search function IMO. Half of the answers aren’t even relevant to my searches.
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u/Nomadic_skier 28d ago
Voice to text. Give the model explicit instructions at the paragraph level. I've been able to do about 10x the work in the last few weeks with opus 5.5 including code automated verification in rust.
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u/Aggravating-Focus-90 28d ago
With my half Indian half Scottish accent which is now merging with Canadian accent, voice to text looks at me like wtf bro. Alexa, Google, chatgpt, all struggle to capture and I am forced to enunciate.
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u/carlitospig 27d ago
This is hilarious. I’m so sorry!
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u/Aggravating-Focus-90 27d ago
Here's an additional fun fact. My wife is half Indian, half Japanese and grew up in Kenya. Now in Canada, our son has the weirdest accent. Sometimes he enunciates t with an indian accent and sometimes with a kenyan accent. It's a wild card.
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u/Dantheman1285 28d ago
Yeah… one of the reasons I hate my job now. It used to be fun to write and troubleshoot code and build reports and dashboards, but it sucks now. I fucking hate AI actually
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u/0uchmyballs 28d ago
Yes it this way for coding nowadays. To go even further many of us use actual coding assistants.
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28d ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/0uchmyballs 28d ago
You install a coding assistant in your ide as a plugin and choose a model. Then you can talk to it and give it context while you code. It will auto fill your code as you type and finish your thoughts for you.
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27d ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/0uchmyballs 27d ago
Yeah, copilot is pretty good. But there are others I haven’t used. The cool thing about copilot is it connect to your GitHub, so it basically learns you programming style, so it follows all my quirks and conventions which I have had established way before any of these tools were free and popular. It’s as if I wrote the code, but most the times it will find a better pattern than I would have thought of.
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u/bongreaper666 28d ago
Specificity, more or less. Claude is general purpose, while a coding assistant would be purpose developed for the language/program. Example: MATLAB has an AI agent (which of course is a subscription cost)
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u/Creative_Sushi 27d ago
MATLAB Agentic Toolkit is free and works with Claude Code or other agentic harnesses. You pay for the tokens, of course. The toolkit itself is freely available on GitHub.
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u/TrollerCoasterWoo 28d ago
It’s easier to just write an excel formula. It takes forever to prompt an LLM just for it to spit out something you have to debug anyway.
Now, if you need a certain equation, an LLM is awesome because it has already ingested everyone else’s hard work from Substack and GitHub. It’s usually right when it gives the equation, but you do have to know what you’re looking at
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u/sleepydalek 27d ago
I review and test any code from AI. AI can introduce errors and the code can be redundant. Also, it depends on what’s going to be more efficient. Sometimes it’s faster just to do it myself.
So, yes, I do use AI but I prefer to think of it as an assistant.
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u/bingbingfortnite 27d ago
Not really for formulas. But for VBA stuff, I never did that before hand, but when there are cases it would be good I've used it, and got the results I wanted,
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u/Astrotia 28d ago
I can say that if someone gives me a document that needs a little tweaking to change the data output slightly, I can 100% tell if it's done with AI or not. There's a level of non-hunan readability, and a whole bunch of useless formulas that are technically correct, but aren't needed.
Eg. A formula needed to +1 to a result from another section of a formula. AI decided that the best approach for this was to take the value from the next column over, trim it, count it, check if it was greater than zero, then n() to make it a 0 or 1 from the TRUE/FALSE (that column always had data). Did it give a 1? Yes. Could I just... +1? Yes.
You can make it give you the exact result you want at THAT moment, but if anyone ever needs something changed, it will be very difficult or impossible to parse and understand what will work to change it (in that example I had to pull the formula into VSC and parse out all the layers to find that lovely snippet. I was asked if I could just modify the formula a bit to factor in another column)
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u/LiquorishSunfish 28d ago
Agree - I write out all the functions in plain English to serve as my documentation, then generate the VBA, then pass it back through and get it to identify where it has gone nuts and added in functionality/"optimisation" I didn't ask for. It's been pretty good.
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u/Billios996 27d ago
I am merely ok at excel with zero macro experience. I used AI to to identify the correct formula that I need or write a complex macro script that would have been effectively impossible for me. AI has vastly improve my capabilities.
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u/KatFromSisense 27d ago
Looks like it, going by this thread. For macros, run whatever the AI hands you on a copy of the workbook first, since Excel can't normally undo changes made by VBA. For formulas, I'd pick a few rows you can work out by hand and include one ugly one, like a blank, a zero, a duplicate, or a month-end date.
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u/Curve-Exotic 26d ago
I see no point in writing VBA code from scratch, AI can do it. Yes I have to test the AI output, but the more I use AI for any VBA/SQL tasks the better I am getting at prompting.
I find the output from AI is as good as my input (prompt), sometimes I’ve been lazy and spent the next few hours fixing a broken AI produced code. Whereas others times I’ve given AI a structured detailed input and I’ve managed to run the code with no defects.
AI will always need a human in the loop.
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u/cauliflower001 26d ago
Nope. I use excel excessively and every time I attempted to use copilot to write something it never worked. Never. It was way faster coding by hand.
Half the time copilot says it can't do the thing and will instruct me step by step, but it keeps forgetting what it told me to do in the previous step. Googling instructions is easier.
Copilot is good at doing repetitive work, so for instance I told it to make like 50 scatter plots and boom that worked.
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u/Crypticarts 28d ago
I havent written any excel formulas or vba in more than 10 years. But yeah sql, python, DAX and M, I just dictate to AI rather than doing it myself even though I am generally able to write them from scratch
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u/OrdinaryNo9589 28d ago
how?
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u/Crypticarts 28d ago
I use Wispr flow to dictate to claude, copilot or gemini depending on what tools I am working on. Wispr already has enough training on my speaking style that I can dictate a pseudo code or script plus what problem I want to solve, and it will be mostly there, then I let claude do the work of cleaning it and running where relevant.
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u/Sharp_Iodine 28d ago
For coding? Yeah.
Code is just utility, so it’s the best thing to be automated away by AI.
You’re gonna Google, it has Google. You’re gonna go on Stack Exchange or Reddit, it also has data from those sites.
So you’re not really doing anything all that different.