Show HN: AI That Understands Spreadsheets

7 AleksMisztal 2 5/8/2025, 8:18:39 PM appsource.microsoft.com ↗

Comments (2)

AleksMisztal · 3h ago
Hey HN! I'm Aleks Misztal, one of the cofounders behind tracelight.

We’ve built an AI that understands spreadsheet financial models and it's available directly in Excel. You can chat with your whole spreadsheet and get natural language descriptions of the precedents in every formula.

Behind the scenes, it's like a coding agent - it combines reasoning models with tools such as semantic search, formula evaluation, and precedent tracing. It's already pretty good (took a lot of iteration on prompts and tool input and output schemas) and will get much better over the coming weeks.

We've also trained a specialised model for semantic understanding of spreadsheets. It's able to assign meaning to each cell in the sheet based on the labels, layout, formulas, styles, etc. We use it to power semantic search and to give feedback to the agent when it uses other tools.

You can download it for free on the Excel add-in store. Let us know what you think!

bitowaqr · 29m ago
I'd like to be able to interact with many spreadsheets in a more programmatic way – do you have an api?