There is no place to leave feedback about copilot and its glaring deficiencies.

Question

A simple process of taking a 3 column spreadsheet and asking for a fourth row of categories matched to information in 1 of the columns stymies Copilot. It has restrictive formatting requirements (not only can it not read images a convert to text, but even simple things like an excel spreadsheet cause it trouble - it wants the data in good old csv. Even then it can't handle more than 150 rows of information, and sometimes that is to much. It recommends to parse a 19000 plus row spreadsheet into pieces of a 100 to 150 chunks, and that not only takes a lot of time (and more than doing it manually) it invites errors of missing or duplicated data. It responds that it indeed has this limitation and suggests scripts or formulas but the reason to use AI is either you don't know how to do that, or don't want to spend the time customizing this for a bespoke calculation. It also decides to tasks other than the one requested, or if it actually does the task, it does not complete it for all of the data.

It also can do summaries or edit text, but the results are pretty vanilla, and the language is boring and filled with buzzwords and it misses the message trying to be conveyed - the engine clearly can't see nuance. It does a passable job of speech recognition, but lots of programs do that now. I don't have to pay for it, but it is also not useful, especially for what AI is supposed to do - make possible and simple and quick boring, repetitive tasks and avoid the errors boring and repetitive tasks invite. It can't do that, so what is the point.

By the way, I used its guidance to try to make it work, and spent a total of more than 8 hours to try 4 times with the same database. You discover that it is not innovative - the same problems and excuses kept coming up, so it is not a learning by figuring out environment. It is copying something, but seems to not want to have to work too hard.

Of course you can't talk to a real person, so asking something that doesn't work, and admits it doesn't work, and then asks you to try again seems, well, stupid.

Even this environment, the only one I could find, wants a child thing for some reason.

If you haven't tried Copilot, don't waste your time.

Maybe in 10 years they will figure it out.

Answer 1

I think I might be wrong here… but for sheets that size the only thing that’s stayed solid for me is pulling just the ID＋target col into a fresh txt file, running the labels in small ranges, then stitching it back with a simple lookup so u don’t lose a single row.