What if you could cut hours of tedious spreadsheet work down to mere minutes? Nate Jones explores how the integration of Anthropic’s Claude AI into Microsoft Excel is reshaping the way professionals approach data-heavy tasks. Imagine generating an 11-tab financial model, complete with sensitivity analyses, in just 10 minutes, or having a virtual assistant that understands your workbook’s structure as if it were second nature. This isn’t just a minor upgrade; it’s a bold leap forward in productivity, blending advanced AI reasoning with Excel’s familiar interface…….Continue reading….
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Source: Geeky Gadgets
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Excel users can access external data sources via Microsoft Office features such as (for example) .odc connections built with the Office Data Connection file format. Excel files themselves may be updated using a Microsoft supplied ODBC driver.
Excel can accept data in real-time through several programming interfaces, which allow it to communicate with many data sources such as Bloomberg and Reuters (through addins such as Power Plus Pro).
- Dynamic Data Exchange uses the message passing mechanism in Windows to allow data to flow between Excel and other applications. Although it is easy for users to create such links, programming such links reliably is so difficult that Microsoft, the creators of the system, officially refer to it as “the protocol from hell”. In spite of its many issues DDE remains the most common way for data to reach traders in financial markets.
- Network DDE extended the DDE protocol to allow spreadsheets on different computers to exchange data. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft no longer supports Network DDE.
- Real Time Data, although in many ways technically superior to DDE, has been slow to gain acceptance, since it requires non-trivial programming skills, and when first released was neither adequately documented nor supported by major data vendors.
Alternatively, Microsoft Query provides ODBC-based browsing within Microsoft Excel. Programmers have produced APIs to open Excel spreadsheets in a variety of applications and environments other than Microsoft Excel. These include opening Excel documents on the web using either ActiveX controls, or plugins like the Adobe Flash Player. The Apache POI open-source project provides Java libraries for reading and writing Excel spreadsheet files.
Microsoft Excel protection offers several types of passwords:
- Password to open a document
- Password to modify a document
- Password to unprotect the worksheet
- Password to protect workbook
- Password to protect the sharing workbook
All passwords except password to open a document can be removed instantly regardless of the Microsoft Excel version used to create the document. These types of passwords are used primarily for shared work on a document. Such password-protected documents are not encrypted, and data sources from a set password are saved in a document’s header.
Password to protect workbook is an exception – when it is set, a document is encrypted with the standard password “VelvetSweatshop”, but since it is known to the public, it actually does not add any extra protection to the document. The only type of password that can prevent a trespasser from gaining access to a document is the password to open a document.
The cryptographic strength of this kind of protection depends strongly on the Microsoft Excel version that was used to create the document. In Microsoft Excel 95 and earlier versions, the password to open is converted to a 16-bit key that can be instantly cracked. In Excel 97/2000 the password is converted to a 40-bit key, which can also be cracked very quickly using modern equipment. As regards services that use rainbow tables (e.g. Password-Find), it takes up to several seconds to remove protection.
In addition, password-cracking programs can brute-force attack passwords at a rate of hundreds of thousands of passwords a second, which not only lets them decrypt a document but also find the original password. In Excel 2003/XP the encryption is slightly better – a user can choose any encryption algorithm that is available in the system (see Cryptographic Service Provider). Due to the CSP, an Excel file cannot be decrypted, and thus the password to open cannot be removed, though the brute-force attack speed remains quite high.
Nevertheless, the older Excel 97/2000 algorithm is set by the default. Therefore, users who do not change the default settings lack reliable protection of their documents. The situation changed fundamentally in Excel 2007, where the modern AES algorithm with a key of 128 bits started being used for decryption, and a 50,000-fold use of the hash function SHA1 reduced the speed of brute-force attacks down to hundreds of passwords per second.
In Excel 2010, the strength of the protection by the default was increased two times due to the use of a 100,000-fold SHA1 to convert a password to a key. Excel for the web is a free lightweight version of Microsoft Excel available as part of Office on the web, which also includes web versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Excel for the web can display most of the features available in the desktop versions of Excel, although it may not be able to insert or edit them. Certain data connections are not accessible on Excel for the web, including with charts that may use these external connections. Excel for the web also cannot display legacy features, such as Excel 4.0 macros or Excel 5.0 dialog sheets. There are also small differences between how some of the Excel functions work.
Excel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet software, VisiCalc: the program displays cells organized in rows and columns, and each cell may contain data or a formula, with relative or absolute references to other cells.
Excel 2.0 for Windows, which was modeled after its Mac GUI-based counterpart, indirectly expanded the installed base of the then-nascent Windows environment. Excel 2.0 was released a month before Windows 2.0, and the installed base of Windows was so low at that point in 1987 that Microsoft had to bundle a runtime version of Windows 1.0 with Excel 2.0.[132] Unlike Microsoft Word, there never was a DOS version of Excel.
Excel became the first spreadsheet to allow the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes, and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell re-computation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are updated (previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command).
Excel introduced auto-fill, the ability to drag and expand the selection box to automatically copy a cell or row contents to adjacent cells or rows, adjusting the copies intelligently by automatically incrementing cell references or contents. Excel also introduced extensive graphing capabilities.
Excel holds a central place in modern office work: a 2022 survey found that two-thirds of office workers use Excel at least once per hour, spending 38% of their total working time inside the program. It is estimated between 750 million and 1.2 billion users access Excel each month.
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