Google may be gearing up to launch its own chatbot called Bard to the public, but the star of the AI show right now is undoubtedly ChatGPT. The OpenAI general purpose dialog chatbot recently saw its version 4.0 release with a ton of new capabilities, and it has kicked off the race to create the best general purpose language AI just yet — despite many shortcomings.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT isn’t only good at making conversations, though. Some versions of ChatGPT offer APIs that allow developers to leverage the smarts of the system for their own projects, and that’s the case for a new Google Sheets extension that takes the hassle out of creating formulas and repetitive jobs you couldn’t automate with onboard tools.

The extension was created by Redditor u/rtwalz, who also introduced it on the Google Subreddit. Once installed to your account, it adds a few new functions to Sheets: =AI(), =INFER(), and =WRITE(). The first option lets you interact with ChatGPT right within your sheet, asking it to generate an answer for any query written out as a sentence you can imagine. As an example, u/rtwalz offers a list of email addresses, asking the AI to guess the names of the contacts based on their email names alone.

=WRITE() is similar to the AI function and allows you to generate text based on your descriptions. You could use this to create summaries for longer texts or explain certain options in a table. =INFER() feels the most like a traditional formula, but better. You can use it to show the AI a pattern you created, asking it to complete it for the rest of the data set.

The tool also offers a sidebar that lets you generate formulas by describing what you want to achieve, which is probably the feature that will see the most use. In addition to that, you can ask the extension to explain formulas to you. This is great for those instances when you’re not sure what your Excel expert colleague created in your shared spreadsheet.

Does it really work well?

To put the extension through its paces, I created a budget with a few different items that I wanted to categorize. To give the AI a starting point, I added a few categories like “Household” for rent or “Entertainment” for a TV cable subscription, and then used the infer formula to finish categorizing the rest. This is something that you traditionally can’t use a formula for, as there is no way for Google Sheets to guess which category fits which expense. The ChatGPT-powered infer tool had no issues with this at all. It automatically categorized the remaining items in the budget, even adding a few new ones that made more sense than any I created before. For example, it created a “Financial Services” category for my bank account fee and an “Education” item for my library card.

With this categorization out of the way, the next step for me was to break down how much money is spent in each category. I used the formula generation tool for this, prompting it to “calculate the sum of the numbers in column C that have the ‘Household’ category in column D next to them.” The system correctly created a =SUMIF formula that took care of just that. For other categories, it is then simple to copy and paste this formula with tweaked text.

Using the formula generation tool to calculate the sum of the numbers in column

To put the AI formula to the test, I asked the AI to give me recommendations on how to save money within these categories. Here, the results weren’t exactly overwhelming, but this could be a matter of my query, which was: “Explain how I can save money on expenses listed in the Household category in this table.” The tool didn’t understand that I was only asking about expenses in the Household category and gave recommendations for all items listed, and on top of that, the answer was cut off after the 7th item. It also unironically suggested that I turn off the gas when not in use. Yes, I very much like to avoid a gas explosion, thank you. There are a few more quirks in this answer, so here it is in full:

Rent: Look for cheaper rental options in the area, such as shared housing or a smaller apartment.

Electricity: Make sure to turn off lights and appliances when not in use, and use energy-efficient lightbulbs.

Natural gas: Make sure to turn off the gas when not in use, and use energy-efficient appliances.

TV cable subscription: Consider switching to a streaming service such as Netflix or Hulu, or look for cheaper cable packages.

Liability insurance: Shop around for the best rates and compare different providers.

Public transit ticket monthly: Look for discounts or loyalty programs that offer cheaper fares.

Swapfiets bike rental: Consider buying a used bike instead of

The results after creating a query

ChatGPT might change the way we do spreadsheets

The good results, save for the vague AI answers, aren’t entirely surprising. Many people are already using ChatGPT’s dialog interface to create Excel and Google Sheets formulas, so the extension is basically just cutting out the middle man in the form of the chat interface. It's also clear that the tool is much more useful for more complex tasks than my simple sample. Categorizing a small budget and creating a SUMIF formula isn't exactly complicated, so the tool might offer more quality-of-life improvements on bigger spreadsheet projects.

The pricing makes clear that it’s definitely tailored to professional Google Sheet warriors. When you install the extension, you only get 30 ChatGPT tokens for free, after which you will have to pay a monthly fee of at least $10 to retain access to the API and use up to 1,000 tokens a month. The token spending system is a little complex, but the extension’s sidebar does a good job of explaining how much which action will cost. Personally, I would prefer to pay for access tokens that don’t expire after a month, but other than that, the pricing structure seems fair — AI is just pretty expensive at the moment, and the developer isn't a big company that can recoup the costs in other ways.

It isn’t entirely clear which version of ChatGPT is used in the tool, either. It’s almost certain that it isn’t the latest ChatGPT 4.0. OpenAI currently only offers various GPT-3 APIs, so unless the tool uses unofficial ways around it, it’s probably based on an older version. This isn’t necessarily bad, though, since the older models are cheaper and sometimes faster, and within a spreadsheet tool, this might matter more than the new capabilities added by ChatGPT 4.0.