SpreadsheetLLM – Microsoft's new AI system

Microsoft has developed a tool called SpreadsheetLLM to help large language models (LLMs) analyze spreadsheet data more efficiently. The tool addresses challenges posed by the format of spreadsheets, such as numerous homogeneous rows or columns that make analysis difficult for both LLMs and humans. To overcome token constraints in LLMs, Microsoft also introduced SheetCompressor, which reduces token usage for encoding spreadsheet data by up to 96%. While the tool aims to reduce computational costs and improve user interactions with spreadsheet data, it currently has limitations, such as ignoring cell background colors and lacking support for semantic-based compression methods. The potential impact of SpreadsheetLLM on transforming spreadsheet data management and analysis tasks, especially in business settings, remains to be seen as it is currently a lab-level effort without a confirmed release as a product. If made public, the tool could enable non-technical users to query and manipulate spreadsheet data using natural language prompts.