I Tried AI Plugins in Excel So You Don’t Have To (Copilot, Numerous.ai, Formula Bot, Ajelix, Power GPT)

Why I Even Bothered With AI in Excel

I work in a very typical office job: endless spreadsheets, messy exports, last‑minute “Can you send this before lunch?” messages on Teams.

A normal week for me looks like:

• Cleaning customer feedback exported from some old system
• Turning raw sales data into charts my manager can drop into PowerPoint
• Fixing formulas somebody else copy‑pasted three years ago and nobody understands anymore

I’m decent in Excel. Not an expert. I can survive with VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, basic pivot tables. But every time I have to build some gnarly nested formula, I end up Googling for half an hour.

At some point in 2025, it felt like every blog post and LinkedIn post was yelling:

“Use AI, stop suffering in Excel!”

So I gave in.

Over the past months I tried several AI options that plug into Excel in different ways:

• Microsoft Copilot in Excel (built into Microsoft 365, using the new =COPILOT() function and the Copilot panel) ¹
• Numerous.ai (add‑in with an =AI() function for Excel and Google Sheets) ²
• Formula Bot (started as an Excel formula generator, now an “AI data analyst” with Excel add‑ons) ³
• Ajelix Excel Add‑in (Excel assistant that generates and explains formulas and translates sheets) ⁴
• Power GPT Add‑in (Excel add‑in focused on answering questions and generating formulas/VBA/SQL) ⁵

I’m not a data scientist. I’m just someone who wants to get home on time. So this review is from that angle:

• Does it actually save time?
• Do I trust it on real work?
• Or is it just another shiny thing that slows you down?

What “AI Plugin for Excel” Really Means in 2025

When people say “AI for Excel,” they often mash together very different tools. From actually using them, I’d split them like this.

1. Built‑in AI from Microsoft (Copilot in Excel)

If your company pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you get Copilot inside Excel itself. You can:

• Use a side panel where you type things like “Summarize this table and show top 5 trends”
• Use the new =COPILOT() function, where you put a natural‑language prompt into a cell, plus a range, and it returns AI‑generated results right into the sheet ⁶

Microsoft advertises that Copilot can suggest functions, analyze trends, and create visualizations like charts based on your data. ¹

The catch:

• It’s only available if you have the right Copilot license, and it’s still rolling out through the Excel beta channel on Windows and Mac. ⁶
• Microsoft is very clear: do not use it for things that require strict accuracy or reproducibility, like financial reporting or legal work, because AI can be wrong. ⁷

So it’s powerful, but with big warning labels.

2. In‑sheet AI Add‑ins (ChatGPT‑style in Excel)

Plugins like Numerous.ai, Formula Bot, Ajelix Excel Add‑in, and Power GPT fall into this bucket.

Common things they do:

• Add a special function, like =AI() (Numerous.ai) ²
• Or open a side panel where you describe what you want
• Generate formulas, rewrite or clean text, summarize data, sometimes even generate charts or basic analysis

Short version: they sneak ChatGPT‑style power directly into cells.

Key differences in how they position themselves:

• Numerous.ai – Very “just use =AI() in your cell and go.” Focuses on categorizing, summarizing and generating text in bulk, plus marketing tasks. They emphasize no API keys and team‑friendly plans. ²
• Formula Bot – Markets itself as an “AI data analyst”. Started from formulas, now focuses more on charts, insights, and multi‑source data analysis, with Excel/Sheets add‑ons included. ³
• Ajelix Excel Add‑in – Very formula‑focused: generates and explains formulas and can translate full spreadsheets into many languages. Part of a larger suite of spreadsheet AI tools. ⁴
• Power GPT – Positions itself as “an Excel expert by your side.” It answers questions in your own language, explains formulas, and can generate formulas, VBA, and SQL. ⁵

These feel more “classic plugin”: you install them, usually sign into their account system, and they live in your Excel ribbon or side panel.

3. External Formula Generator Websites & Extensions

There’s a whole zoo of AI formula generators on the web: Ajelix’s online tool, Sourcetable’s formula assistant, random “AI Excel Formula Generator” sites, Chrome extensions that sit beside Excel on the web, and so on. ⁸

They are helpful when you just want a formula and don’t want to install anything. But day‑to‑day, I found the direct Excel add‑ins much smoother, so I’ll focus on those.

How These AI Plugins Actually Feel in Real Work

I’ll walk through how each one felt in real situations from my job.

Microsoft Copilot in Excel – The Fancy Colleague Who’s Sometimes Wrong

Once our IT team finally turned Copilot on for a subset of licenses, I got to try it in Excel.

The setup and UI

Copilot shows up in two main ways:

• A Copilot panel on the right
• The =COPILOT() formula that you can type directly into cells, like =COPILOT("Classify this feedback", D4:D200) ⁶

It feels native. It looks like other Excel panes. No extra logins. When your company already pays for Copilot across Word, PowerPoint, Teams, etc., this is very convenient. ⁹

The “oh wow” moment

My first real test was a customer feedback sheet:

• 1,500 rows of free‑text comments
• I needed to categorize them into themes: shipping, pricing, product quality, website issues, “other”

I selected the column, used the =COPILOT() function with a simple instruction like:

“Classify each comment into one of these categories: Shipping, Pricing, Product quality, Website, Other.”

Excel filled a new column with the categories. Some entries were imperfect, but I’d say 75–80% were instantly usable. Compared to manually reading 1,500 lines, this was huge.

Microsoft itself promotes this kind of scenario: summarizing or classifying text, creating tables, helping with formulas, and generating visual summaries based on your data. ¹

The frustrating parts

Where I quickly got cautious:

• Numbers can be off. Microsoft openly says not to rely on Copilot for tasks that require strict accuracy or reproducibility (financial reporting, legal work, etc.). ⁷
• Limited uses in bursts. There are rate limits on =COPILOT() calls in a short time window, so you can’t spam it nonstop across huge ranges without hitting some ceiling. ¹⁰
• No live web or company doc access in that function. =COPILOT() works only on the data you give it; it doesn’t go browse the web or internal documents directly. ⁶

Emotionally, the feeling is:

“This is amazing for exploration and first drafts, but I would never just press Enter and send results straight to finance.”

Everyday use

Where Copilot actually stuck in my workflow:

• Drafting first versions of charts and summary tables for status decks
• Categorizing messy free‑text fields
• Asking it in the panel to “Highlight unusual spikes in this data for the last six months” and using that as a starting point

It’s like a bright junior analyst who’s fast but still needs supervision.

Numerous.ai – =AI() in Every Cell

If Copilot is built into Excel itself, Numerous.ai feels like bolting ChatGPT right onto your spreadsheet.

How it works in practice

After you install the add‑in and set up an account, you can:

• Type =AI("your instruction", A2:A200) directly in cells
• Or use its interface (depending on how you install it) to run AI tasks on ranges

Their site heavily emphasizes the simple =AI function and “no API keys needed,” plus support for both Excel and Google Sheets. ²

Typical things I used it for:

• Translation in bulk
  • E.g., product descriptions from English to German across hundreds of rows (their examples highlight exactly this kind of task). ¹¹
• Text cleanup
  • Standardizing capitalization, removing weird extra spaces from survey responses
• Quick categorization
  • Tagging content types or sentiment for marketing data

The good parts

The biggest win is mental simplicity:

• I already think in formulas in Excel
• =AI() just becomes another formula, like =SUM() but more powerful

I also liked that:

• It’s built for bulk work: you can drag the formula down and let it churn through rows, with internal caching so repeated prompts don’t re‑charge you unnecessarily. ²
• It doesn’t force me into a separate chat window every time. The logic is right there in the cell, and you can read your own natural‑language instruction later.

Pricing‑wise, they offer personal and team plans (for example, a personal plan with a character limit and a set number of formula generations per month) and enterprise options with more data and team support. ²

The annoying parts

What bothered me:

• You still have to think about prompts. If you write a vague instruction, you get vague results.
• There’s a token/usage limit, so if you drag =AI() across thousands of rows with long text and long prompts, you can burn through your quota quickly. ²
• It can feel like overkill on tiny tasks where a simple Excel function would do.

Emotionally, Numerous.ai felt like:

“I finally have ChatGPT inside my spreadsheet without jumping between tabs, but I still need to babysit what it does.”

Formula Bot – When You Want an AI “Data Analyst”

Formula Bot started life as a formula generator. Over time, it’s turned into a broader AI data analysis tool with add‑ins for Excel and Google Sheets. ³

What it’s trying to be

From their own description, the pitch is:

• Upload or connect your data
• Ask questions in plain English
• Get charts, tables, insights and more

Behind the scenes, it still can generate formulas and explain them, but the focus is more on analysis, visualization, and multi‑source data (Excel, Google Sheets, databases, web analytics, etc.). ³

Their plans (Starter, Pro, Max) include:

• A certain number of AI messages and tool credits per month
• Access to Excel and Google Sheets add‑ons
• Different limits for file sizes, performance, and “playbooks” (scheduled automated analyses). ³

How it felt in Excel

In Excel, Formula Bot felt more like:

• “Send this sheet to the AI, have a conversation about it, get back results.”

Instead of just =AI() in cells, I often ended up:

• Uploading or referencing a sheet
• Asking questions in the Formula Bot interface
• Pulling back generated tables or charts

This fits tasks like:

• “What are the main trends in monthly revenue by region?”
• “Build a chart comparing year‑over‑year growth by product line.”

I noticed that for more complex analysis, it was more comfortable than Numerous.ai. For quick little inline tasks, Numerous felt lighter.

Where it fell short for me

Honestly, for my daily office chores, Formula Bot sometimes felt too heavy:

• I don’t always need an “AI data analyst” for small tweaks
• The pricing and credits made me overthink, “Is this question worth spending a credit?”

But for bigger analysis projects where I’m staring at a messy table and don’t even know which chart to build yet, it was surprisingly helpful as a thinking partner.

Ajelix Excel Add‑in – Formula Helper and Translator

Ajelix is a whole platform of spreadsheet tools, and one piece of that is the Excel add‑in.

They describe the add‑in as a way to generate and explain formulas and translate spreadsheets into more than 28 languages, plus some extra productivity tricks included in paid plans. ⁴

What I actually used it for

• Explaining legacy formulas: copy a monster formula into Ajelix, ask it to explain.
• Generating formulas from plain language: “I want to sum all rows where status is ‘Closed’ and date is in 2024.”
• Translating spreadsheet content when we had to localize templates for a different region.

Their overall offering also includes a web formula generator and over 20 different AI spreadsheet tools under one subscription, which makes it broader than just an add‑in. ⁴

The feel

This one felt a bit like going to a friendly Excel tutor. Less about deep data analysis, more about:

• “Help me understand what this workbook is doing.”
• “Help me write the right formula faster.”

If you’re constantly copy‑pasting formulas from Stack Overflow or Reddit, Ajelix is a nice safety net.

Power GPT – “Excel Expert” in Your Sidebar

Power GPT is another Excel add‑in that focuses on answering spreadsheet questions in your own language, explaining formulas, and generating formulas, VBA, and SQL. ⁵

They frame it as:

“Like having an Excel expert by your side, 24/7.”

Pricing is around $10 per user per month or $100 per year, with a limited‑time 50% discount at the time I checked, and there’s a free trial via the Microsoft store. ⁵

How it fit into my day

This one felt very much like:

• Ask, “How do I do X in Excel?”
• Get an explanation plus a formula or VBA snippet
• Paste it into your workbook

Useful moments:

• When I wanted quick help generating a macro but didn’t want to read five blog posts
• When I needed a complex formula and was too tired to think through all the IFs and ANDs

Compared to Ajelix, Power GPT felt slightly more like a general Q&A assistant around Excel, including VBA, while Ajelix felt more formula‑ and translation‑oriented.

Quick Comparison Table (What’s Best for Who)

Here’s how these options landed for me after a few weeks of mixing them into real work.

Image suggestion: A wide screenshot of Excel with several side panels open: Copilot on the right, a cell with =AI() from Numerous.ai, and an Ajelix explanation window for a long formula.

Where AI Plugins Really Shine in Excel

After playing with all these, there are a few areas where AI in Excel genuinely feels like magic.

1. Turning Wall‑of‑Text into Something You Can Use

Whether it’s survey responses, support tickets, or free‑text notes from a CRM, the pain is always the same: how do I turn this into something countable?

With Copilot’s =COPILOT() or Numerous.ai’s =AI() function, you can:

• Classify each row into themes
• Extract key phrases
• Mark sentiment as positive/negative/neutral

Once you have that new column, you can pivot, chart, and present like a normal human again. ¹

2. Getting from “I Know What I Want” to “I Know the Formula”

This is where Ajelix, Numerous.ai, Power GPT and Formula Bot all help.

You describe:

“Sum all sales for 2024 where status is Closed and region is North.”

The tool then gives you something like:

• =SUMIFS(SalesColumn, YearColumn, 2024, StatusColumn, "Closed", RegionColumn, "North")

Some tools also explain the formula in plain language so you’re not just trusting it blindly. ¹²

Over time, I noticed I was learning formulas from the AI output, almost like new vocabulary.

3. Cleaning Data Without Losing Your Will to Live

Common clean‑up tasks:

• Splitting first and last names
• Removing extra spaces, weird characters and emojis
• Standardizing formats (e.g., US vs EU date formats, phone numbers)

You can ask the AI to:

• “Trim extra spaces, keep only letters and numbers, and convert to lowercase”
• “Extract the domain from this email address”

Tools like Numerous.ai and external formula generators show examples of exactly this kind of cleanup work. ¹¹

Once you figure out a good prompt, you can drag it down the column and reuse it across projects.

4. Drafting Reports Faster

I’ve used Copilot, Formula Bot, and even Power GPT to:

• Draft quick summaries of a table, like
  • “Sales in Q3 grew X% over Q2, mainly driven by Product A”
• Generate bullet points describing a chart
• Prepare “talking points” for status emails

Microsoft explicitly promotes Copilot in Excel for this: turning data into easy‑to‑understand reports and visuals. ¹

Do I copy‑paste the text as‑is? No. But it’s easier to edit a rough draft than to stare at a blank Outlook email.

Where AI Plugins Disappoint or Scare Me

It’s not all sunshine.

Accuracy is Still a Big Question Mark

This is the part that made me the most nervous.

Microsoft itself warns that Copilot’s outputs should not be used for tasks that require strict accuracy or reproducibility, especially in legal or financial contexts, because AI can miscalculate or hallucinate. ⁷

Third‑party tools are similar: they’re great at patterns, not perfect truth.

Real example from my work:

• I asked an AI tool to calculate a complex commission structure
• It wrote a beautiful formula
• The logic was slightly off in a corner case

If I hadn’t checked it manually with a few test rows, we would have underpaid somebody.

My rule now:

“AI can propose formulas and logic, but humans sign off.”

Quotas, Limits and Subscriptions Everywhere

Each tool has its own:

• Usage caps
• Token limits
• Credit systems
• Subscription tiers

Copilot’s =COPILOT() function has rate limits per 10 minutes and per hour. ¹⁰

Third‑party tools like Numerous.ai, Formula Bot, Ajelix and Power GPT also impose monthly caps on formulas, characters, tool credits or similar. ²

So you’re always half thinking:

• “Is this worth a call?”
• “Do I need to upgrade?”

It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s another mental tax.

Privacy and Compliance Worries

Vendors emphasize that:

• User data sent to =COPILOT() is not used to train Microsoft’s models and remains confidential. ⁶
• Other tools say similar things about privacy and security.

But from a regular office worker’s point of view, I follow company policy:

• I do not feed highly sensitive data (payroll, legal disputes, etc.) into external tools unless IT explicitly approves them.
• If your company is strict about data, check with IT before installing anything beyond Copilot or official Microsoft store add‑ins.

How I Actually Use AI in Excel Now

After the novelty wore off, here’s what stuck in my real routine.

My “Default Stack”

• If my company is paying for Copilot:
  • I lean on Copilot in Excel for summaries, charts, and quick classification
  • I keep it far away from financial statements and legal numbers
• For heavy formula and explanation help:
  • Ajelix and Power GPT are my mental backup for “What on earth is this workbook doing?” ¹²
• For bulk text/data cleanup:
  • Numerous.ai’s =AI() is very convenient in columns of text. ²
• For bigger analysis projects:
  • Formula Bot is what I open when I want to explore a dataset, not just fix a formula. ³

My Simple Rules

• Let AI draft things; don’t let it finalize important numbers
• Always test new AI‑generated formulas on a few rows you understand
• Save good prompts – they’re almost like reusable macros now
• If you’re rushing to meet a deadline, use AI for the grunt work, not the final decision

Is an AI Plugin for Excel Worth It?

If you’re expecting a dramatic movie answer like “Yes, AI replaced my job” or “No, it’s all hype”… sorry. Reality is messier.

Here’s my honest take:

• If your company already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot, absolutely play with Copilot in Excel. It’s one of the few tools that genuinely changed how I start working with data, especially text. ¹
• If you work in marketing, ops, or customer support, an add‑in like Numerous.ai is very tempting. The =AI() pattern just fits how we already think in Excel. ²
• If you are more of a data‑analysis‑heavy person or a founder wearing a data hat, Formula Bot can feel like an extra analyst available on demand, especially when you connect different data sources. ³
• If you constantly inherit ugly, ancient workbooks, Ajelix and Power GPT are like friends who patiently explain what’s going on and write new formulas or VBA when you’re stuck. ¹²

Do these tools save time?

Yes, a lot, once you get past the learning curve and accept that you still have to check the result.

Do they let you be lazy?

Not really. They move your effort from “typing and Googling” to “designing clear instructions and verifying outputs.” The work is different, but it’s still work.

Would I go back to a world without any AI help in Excel?

Honestly… I’d miss it. I wouldn’t cry, but I’d feel like I lost a very fast, slightly unreliable assistant.

If you’re curious, start small:

• Pick one plugin that fits your budget and your role
• Use it for just one recurring pain point (e.g., survey classification, formula generation, data cleanup)
• Decide after a month if it’s worth keeping

That’s much less stressful than trying everything at once, and it keeps the focus on real work, not shiny features.