Excel Labs

Excel Labs, a Microsoft Garage project, is an add-in that allows the Excel team to release experimental Excel features and gather customer feedback about them. Although some features may never make it into Excel, experimentation and feedback are vital.

Excel Labs currently includes two features:

1. Advanced formula environment: An interface designed for authoring, editing, and reusing formulas.
2. LABS.GENERATIVEAI function: A custom function that allows you to send prompts from the Excel grid to a generative AI model and then return the results from the model directly back to your worksheet. This is not part of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Advanced formula environment

Advanced formula environment makes it easy to create, edit, and reuse formulas and named LAMBDA functions.

While Excel Name Manager lets you name and reuse any formula, including functions defined with LAMBDA, the interface makes it difficult to author these formulas. Common features that make programming easier are missing, such as immediate inline errors and syntax highlighting. Advanced formula environment fills this gap. It’s an interface for the Excel Name Manager that is designed for formula authoring.

Using the advanced formula environment, you can:

• Write formulas using an editor that supports inline errors, IntelliSense, comments, and more.
• Indent formulas, making them easier to read.
• Edit modules of named formulas using a single code editor.
• Quickly reuse LAMBDA formulas by importing them from GitHub gists, or by copying them for other workbooks.

LABS.GENERATIVEAI function

With the announcement of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the project team sees great potential in the power of generative AI. Using this experimental add-in, you can test the benefits of generative AI directly in the Excel grid. This is not part of M365 Copilot but rather a place for you to play and experiment with generative AI today, as a Microsoft Garage project.

LABS.GENERATIVEAI function allows you to send prompts from the Excel grid to a generative AI model and then return the results from the model back to your worksheet.

You can send the model simple or complex prompts to analyze information, process data, produce a response based on a sample, and more. LABS.GENERATIVEAI allows you to reference other cells in your workbook, and it can be called inside any Excel cell or named formula in the workbook.

The following examples show several ways to use LABS.GENERATIVEAI.

• Analyze public information. Ask a model to summarize a complicated topic, such as: =LABS.GENERATIVEAI(“Explain generative AI in a sentence.”)
• Return creative content. Ask a model to create content about a particular subject, such as: =LABS.GENERATIVEAI(“Write a poem about Excel.”)
• Process data and define the format. Ask a model to return publicly available data and tell it how to format the information. Set the temperature value to 0 in the function to return consistent responses from the model, for example: =LABS.GENERATIVEAI(“Convert these airport codes into a comma-separated list of cities. The codes: LAX, HND, LHR, JNB.”, 0)

The generative AI function includes settings which let you choose from different models, control the default output length of results returned from the models, limit creativity, and more.

This function uses generative AI technology from OpenAI. To use the LABS.GENERATIVEAI function, you must register an OpenAI account and generate a unique API key.

Platform support

Excel Labs works in Excel for Desktop, Mac, and on the web without installing any additional software. To get started, install the Excel Labs add-in from the Office Store.

Feedback

Excel Labs is a collaboration between the Excel and Microsoft Research Cambridge teams, and the team is actively seeking feedback on this Microsoft Garage project. The project team wants to know what works, what doesn’t, and what you would like to see next. Please share your feedback via the GitHub repository or in the Microsoft Excel community hub.