Textbook in PDF format Looking to take your Excel skills to the next level? With the power of AI, you can supercharge your workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and perform advanced data analysis. Written for Excel users with little to no AI experience, this book bridges the gap between traditional spreadsheet skills and the revolutionary capabilities of generative AI—empowering professionals to work smarter, faster, and with greater precision. Whether you're a data analyst, financial professional, project manager, or Excel enthusiast, this book will give you practical tutorials and actionable insights for integrating AI into your everyday work. Learn how to prepare, analyze, and visualize data using tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, and leverage AI's power to generate insights that drive better business decisions. With its step-by-step guidance, this book will be your go-to reference as you unlock a new level of productivity and analytical expertise. Excel has been around for decades, and in that time it has become a core part of most workplaces. I’ve seen it evolve from a simple spreadsheet into a platform that underpins decision-making across finance, operations, research, government, and education, often in the hands of people who never thought of themselves as “technical.” Yet for all its power, Excel has always asked a lot of its users, with formulas to memorize, features to discover, and logic to debug. Generative AI fundamentally changes that experience. Instead of spending time and energy writing complex formulas or searching for the right feature, users can describe their intent and let AI do the heavy lifting. This shift to AI doesn’t remove the need for user skill and knowledge. Being able to guide, question, and verify AI output is now a core capability, and in this book Angelica Lo Duca shows how to develop exactly those skills. Rather than offer a list of prompts to copy, she teaches practical, transferable ways of structuring prompts that readers can adapt to their own work. A macro in Excel is a set of automated commands that allows you to quickly perform repetitive tasks, such as formatting data, creating reports, or performing complex calculations. You can write macros using the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) programming language or record macros without writing code. I’m a computer engineer, and programming has been a steady companion for many years, so writing a chapter that brings together Python, AI, and Excel is something I genuinely enjoy. In this chapter, I want to give you a taste of what’s possible when you extend Excel with Python, one of the most popular programming languages for data analysis. Using Python turns Excel into an even more potentially. You don’t need to become a full-fledged programmer either. Today, AI can support you even if your coding experience is limited. The real point of this chapter is simple: Python gives you a flexible, unifying scripting layer that connects data access, analysis, and visualization in a way that feels natural for AI-driven workflows. You’ll need to spend a little time getting Python set up in Excel, but that upfront investment pays off quickly in power, clarity, and control. Learn to integrate ChatGPT and Copilot with Excel for enhanced efficiency Understand AI-driven techniques for data preparation, analysis, and visualization in Excel Discover the landscape of AI add-ins like OpenAI API and how to use them effectively Automate routine Excel tasks using generative AI for faster, more precise results Analyze data with AI tools to uncover actionable insights and drive smarter decisions Contents: Preface Using ChatGPT in Excel Breaking the Ice: Introducing AI for Excel Getting Started with ChatGPT and Excel Speeding Up Common Operations with ChatGPT Advanced Operations with ChatGPT Using ChatGPT to Analyze a Dataset Using ChatGPT for PivotTables Macros and VBA Summary Activity Data Science with Copilot Getting Started with Copilot Data Preparation with Copilot Text Transformation and Manipulation Basic Statistics with Copilot Data Analysis with Copilot Data Visualization and Reporting with Copilot Other AI Tools for Excel Landscape of Excel AI Add-Ins Python, Excel, and AI Stories and Solutions A. Before the Nepal Peaks B. Searching for the Truth C. The Showdown D. Solutions to Activities Index