User guide

Spreadsheets

You want a grid of numbers and formulas, or you have an Excel file to work on. This is the spreadsheet program, and how the agent works in it.

The spreadsheet program keeps rows and columns of figures and text, works out formulas, and moves to and from Excel. It opens as a tab in the chat’s browser panel, so the agent can build a spreadsheet for you, then keep changing the same open sheet while you watch.

This article is for anyone who keeps a list, a budget or a rota: how to make or bring in a spreadsheet, what the editor offers, and what to ask the agent for.

The browser panel with a spreadsheet named Volunteer Shifts at aaf://sheet/Volunteer%20Shifts, Saved, with Save and ⋯ beside the name. A note reads “The agent changed Sheet1!A1:C1.” with Undo. Below are the Start, Insert, Formulas and View tabs, the formatting tools and the formula bar, then the sheet: bold headings Time, Task and Needed, and twenty-five shifts from 9-10 to 1-2, such as 9-10 Set up 4, 10-11 Face painting 2 and 1-2 Pack down 4. — Asked for “a spreadsheet called Volunteer Shifts for the school’s spring fair, with columns Time, Task and Needed for each shift”, with every entry kept short, the agent made it, filled it in and opened it beside the chat, after one question answered with its main button. This is a real turn.

Making or bringing in a spreadsheet

Choose File ▸ New ▸ Spreadsheet. The Spreadsheets list opens in a new tab of the browser panel with the name box ready: type a name and press New spreadsheet. A new spreadsheet has one sheet, Sheet1. File ▸ Open ▸ Spreadsheet…, or View ▸ Sheets ▸ All Sheets, opens the same list, where every spreadsheet you have is a link with the time it last changed. Where your spreadsheets are kept, and how saving and versions work, is the same for every program and is in The office.

Import…, beside New spreadsheet, brings in an Excel workbook (.xlsx or .xlsm) or a .csv file, up to 20 MB, as a new spreadsheet. From a workbook it keeps values, formulas, styles, column widths, row heights, merged cells and frozen panes. A .csv file becomes one sheet, with numbers recognised as numbers.

What an import could not bring in is never dropped silently. The new spreadsheet opens with a note — “Imported from …. Not brought in: …” — and a Dismiss button. The note can name charts, pivot tables, images, comments, data validation, conditional formatting, macros and theme colours; Excel tables come in as plain cells, and links to other workbooks as their values.

The editor

Across the top is the bar every program shares: the spreadsheet’s name, whether it is saved, Save, and ⋯ (More), which holds Versions…, Rename…, Export…, All spreadsheets and Delete…. Below it is the spreadsheet itself: a ribbon of tabs, the formula bar, the grid, and the sheet tabs along the bottom.

The ribbon

Start — the format painter and clearing; font, size, bold, italic, underline and strikethrough; text colour and fill; borders; horizontal and vertical alignment, wrapping and text rotation; merging cells; and number formats, including percentages, currency and more or fewer decimal places.
Insert — a link in a cell.
Formulas — the functions, grouped by kind: financial, logical, text, date, lookup, maths, statistical, engineering and more, with a search.
View — freezing rows and columns, zoom, full screen and gridlines.

Right-click

Right-click a cell for copying and pasting special (values only, formats only, column widths), clearing contents or formats, inserting and deleting rows, columns or cells, and Freeze, which includes Freeze first row and Freeze first column. Right-click a column header for Column Width, Fit for data and hiding columns, and a row header for the same on rows. Right-click a sheet tab to rename it, colour it, hide it or delete it.

Formulas

Start a cell with = to write a formula; the formula bar shows the formula while the cell shows its result. The familiar functions are there — sums and averages, lookups such as VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP, conditional totals such as SUMIFS. A formula that cannot be worked out shows an error value such as #DIV/0!, #REF! or #NAME?.

A web or email link in a cell opens in a new tab, never in place of the spreadsheet. Other kinds of link are not followed.

Exporting

⋯ ▸ Export… offers Excel workbook (.xlsx), for the whole spreadsheet, or This sheet as CSV (.csv), for the sheet you are on, then asks where to save the file. The spreadsheet then says “Saved to …” with the file’s place. Exporting is how a spreadsheet leaves the application for another program or another person.

Asking the agent

Ask in your own words: make a spreadsheet of these shifts, add a column, total this, format the amounts as currency, put the headings in bold, add a sheet for the second day, find every row that mentions face painting, export it as a workbook. The agent works in the spreadsheet open in the chat’s browser panel, opening it there first if it needs to. It can read values or the formulas behind them, find text, and see the cells you have selected, so “total the column I’ve selected” works. It can also bring in a .xlsx, .xlsm or .csv file you attach to the chat, as a new spreadsheet, and tell you what was left out.

It writes values and formulas, formats cells (number formats, bold, italic, text colour, fill, alignment and borders), inserts rows, columns and sheets, renames sheets, deletes rows, columns and sheets, and exports to .xlsx or .csv in your Downloads folder.

The same Volunteer Shifts spreadsheet after the second request. A note now reads “The agent changed Sheet1!A27:C27.” with Undo. A new Lead column D gives a first name for each shift, Alice to Yara, and row 27 reads Total in bold with 52 under Needed. — The same spreadsheet after a second request in the same chat: “Add a Lead column with a made-up first name for each shift, and a total of Needed at the bottom.” The note above the grid names the last range the agent changed, with Undo. Nothing was asked this time, because changes to this spreadsheet were already allowed in this chat. This is a real turn.

Each request lands as one change. A note above the grid says what was changed — “The agent changed …” and the cells — with Undo, which takes back that change. If part of a change cannot be made, none of it is: the agent is told “The change couldn’t be made, so nothing was changed” and the spreadsheet is left as it was.

What it asks

Without asking: reading your spreadsheet, finding text in it, and seeing your selection.
Asked once: making a new spreadsheet or bringing one in from a file — allowing that also lets the agent change it in this chat. For a spreadsheet you already had, the first change asks, and its main answer is Allow changes to “…” in this chat; Allow once is behind the arrow beside it. Exporting a copy counts as a change.
Each time: deleting rows, columns or a sheet. Allowing changes never covers a delete.

Approvals and permissions explains the answers in full.

Good to know

The agent does not set column widths or row heights. Right-click a column header and choose Fit for data or Column Width.
There is no print item for a spreadsheet.
Charts, pivot tables and images in an Excel workbook are not brought in; the import note lists them.
Macros in an .xlsm workbook are left out, never run.
The agent reads or formats at most 10,000 cells at a time, so on a large sheet it works through it in parts.
The agent cannot delete a spreadsheet’s only sheet.
Opening a spreadsheet never saves it; only a change does.
A spreadsheet is kept as the application’s own file, not as an Excel file. To hand one to someone, export it.

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