r/excel • u/rtwalz • Apr 19 '23

My ChatGPT excel plugin went viral because of this subreddit Advertisement

Hey r/excel, THANK YOU so much for your support! 3 weeks ago, I shared my Excel plugin that lets you use ChatGPT in a formula. A few thousand of you tried it. It spread to LinkedIn, people made TikTok videos about it, someone even said they heard about it at a dinner party 🤯 You can install it free here: numerous.ai/get

With the super valuable feedback all of you gave me, here are some of the new features I added:

=NUM.INFER

https://i.redd.it/3unkp1wpfwua1.gif

When you'd rather show the AI what to do instead of telling it. In this example, I have a list of payment descriptions. I want to get the dollar amount from each. Instead of telling the AI what to do, I just do the first 4 myself, then it "infers" the rest.

Easy templates

https://i.redd.it/8dewl0frfwua1.gif

In the plugin's sidebar, I added easy to use templates, like Translate, Extract, Reformat, Rewrite. Here's an example of the Classify tool, where I classify a list of merchants.

Let me know what you think!

1.2k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

79 comments sorted by

View all comments

•

u/excelevator 2832 Apr 19 '23 edited Apr 19 '23

This is very clever stuff.. but for everyone reading..

your requests get sent to OpenAI

be very mindful of your private company data being sent outside of your office walls....

Your data could be stolen at best and it might even be illegal with data privacy laws at worst.

Simply installing that plugin could seriously undermine the security of ALL your data across your entire network.

31

u/BronchitisCat 22 Apr 20 '23

Also, the code that gets returned may belong to another person/corporation exposing you to potential copyright lawsuits.

3

u/Jonsj Apr 20 '23

The Excel "code" formula? Is not chatgpt trained on GitHub and other public code?

5

u/guaranic Apr 20 '23

It's likely not caring much about the various license levels on Github and others

2

u/lovethekush Apr 20 '23

Codes can belong to people?

4

u/Ludwig234 Apr 20 '23

Hopefully IT has locked down plugin installation anyways.

3

u/rtwalz Apr 20 '23

This is a great point. To be clear, the only data that leaves your network/computer is data you explicitly pass through to the plugin's functions (=NUM.AI, =NUM.INFER, for example). It doesn't read your entire spreadsheet or look at any of your files. I realize that you can only take what I say at face value though, and I am trying to get the plugin audited by a third party to verify that I really don't do anything with your data.

7

u/daiko7 Apr 20 '23

i think we get that you don't look at our data.

that's not the issue.

openai looking at our data is the issue.

-6

u/vayeate 3 Apr 20 '23

Entire network???? Seems a little exagerated.

7

u/excelevator 2832 Apr 20 '23

Run a process on your pc, and a connected network is also available...

-3

u/vayeate 3 Apr 20 '23

My PC doesn't have access to much on the network. These networks are generally secured. I doubt that this process can take more network access than you have. So it's not your entire network but rather the network access you have.

1

u/ThatDree Apr 20 '23

I understand. But that's not interesting from a business point of view.

1

u/excelevator 2832 Apr 21 '23

Sure they can, they are looking for any and all known security holes, of which there are many.. counting the ones we know about.. and an AI could take full advantage if given access unknowingly of many not known about...

1

u/Reason_He_Wins_Again Jan 25 '24

It is. ChatGPT has no local access to your PC. Silly warning.

-14

u/Neither_Wither Apr 20 '23

"stolen" I know you're trying to be good but when they submit it for free, stolen is a legal term. I got chatGPT to write "they ate bad poop" without even trying. You and I both should have become lawyers. Edit: I can assure you all that I know privacy laws at a database level. Let's talk the talk. I've read more legal bs than most people in my career. Try me.