Had a week where ChatGPT saved me 8 hours fixing a messy Excel sheet at work

I spent Monday morning feeding it chunks of a 5,000-row CSV with garbled dates and it wrote a clean formula in 10 minutes flat, so I'm curious has anyone else leaned on AI to fix a data disaster that normally takes all day?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby45010d ago

Had a buddy who runs a small rental company tell me he spent three days trying to fix a booking spreadsheet where all the dates got stored as text after a bad import. He finally copied like 20 rows into ChatGPT and asked for a fix, and it gave him a one-liner that converted everything in seconds. He said the craziest part was the AI caught a few dates where the month and day were swapped, which he hadn't even noticed after staring at it for hours. Now he just sends me screenshots of his messiest cells and says "watch this" before running it through.

olivia_harris1910d ago

Nah but learning to fix it yourself is way more satisfying than letting a bot do the work.

violamurray10d ago

Excel disasters are the absolute worst and I'm so glad you found that shortcut. I had a similar situation last month with a massive inventory list that had all the product codes stored as text instead of numbers, so nothing would sort or match up. I spent like two hours manually retyping things before I thought to just copy a sample into ChatGPT and ask for a fix. It spat out a macro that converted everything in one click, and I honestly felt like I was cheating at first because it was that easy. The thing that really got me was how it handled the edge cases where some codes had leading zeros too, which I would have definitely messed up if I did it by hand. Now I'm kind of paranoid about how much time I've wasted in the past on stuff I could have just asked an AI to fix in five minutes.