BY JEFF LENNING , CPA

Have you ever encountered any of these common Excel situations where you need to :

• Understand a complex formula or write a formula ?

• Understand a VBA macro that was written by an Excel power user who is no longer available ?

• Write a VBA macro ?

• Get general Excel help ? When you encounter these types of situations , what do you do ? My guess is you probably start with a Google search , then follow several links to various blog posts and videos . Sometimes , they will provide you with the answers you are seeking , but sometimes not . So , when they don ’ t , what do you do ? You are totally stuck … or are you ?

Here ’ s how a free tool called ChatGPT can help with all of these and much more . Let ’ s get to it .

ChatGPT Primer In the simplest terms , ChatGPT is a service that provides text-based responses to your prompts . So , when you provide a prompt such as : When was Excel released ? ChatGPT will provide a response like : Microsoft Excel was first released in September 1985 for Apple Macintosh computers . It was later released for IBM-compatible PCs in November 1987 . Since then , Excel has undergone many updates and versions , and it remains one of the most popular spreadsheet software applications in use today .

In this article , I ’ ll show you how ChatGPT can help with your Excel work . But know that the knowledge base of ChatGPT is unbelievably immense . How does ChatGPT describe itself ? To find out , I asked it . I entered the following prompt : Can you describe ChatGPT in one sentence ? And got the following response : I am ChatGPT , a large language model designed to understand natural language input and generate human-like responses using deep learning algorithms .

If you ’ d like to learn more , head to openai . com . If you ’ d like to create an account and use the service for free , visit chat . openai . com .

Understanding a Complex Formula Let ’ s say you open a workbook and encounter a formula written by someone else . For example : = RIGHT ( B8 , LEN ( B8 ) -FIND (“,”, B8 ) -1 ) You ’ d like to understand what it does . So , you use the following prompt with ChatGPT : What does this excel formula do : = RIGHT ( B8 , LEN ( B8 ) -FIND (“,”, B8 ) -1 ) ChatGPT response : This Excel formula extracts a portion of text from a cell in column B , specifically the text to the right of the comma (“,”) in the cell . www . calcpa . org MAY 2023 CALIFORNIA CPA 9