How to Use AI in Excel to Create and Edit Spreadsheets [Complete 2026 Guide]

78% of organizations worldwide were using AI in their workflows as of 2024, according to McKinsey’s Global AI Survey,, and Excel remains the most widely used data tool in business. Yet most people still build spreadsheets the hard way, manually typing formulas, cleaning data by hand, and formatting cells one by one. Microsoft’s built-in Copilot can help, but it costs $20/month on top of your Microsoft 365 subscription, and while it can now create basic spreadsheets with Edit with Copilot, it works best when editing existing files.

The best way to use AI with Excel in 2026 is Fello AI. It generates complete, downloadable .xlsx files with working formulas, formatted headers, multiple sheets, and styled cells, all from a simple chat message. You get access to GPT-5.4, Claude, and Gemini in one app, and it works on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. No Excel subscription needed.

The Key Takeaways

• Fello AI generates complete .xlsx files with working formulas from chat for $9.99/month, no Excel subscription required
• Fello AI Skills also create Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs, making it a full Office suite companion
• You get access to multiple AI models (GPT-5.4, Claude, Gemini) in one app, pick the best model for each task
• Microsoft Copilot Pro costs $20/month + M365 subscription and works best editing existing spreadsheets
• Free chatbots like ChatGPT can write formulas, but you need to copy-paste them into Excel manually

What AI Can Do in Excel

AI has moved well beyond basic formula suggestions. Here is what you can do with AI in your Excel workflow today:

• Generate formulas from plain English, including SUM, VLOOKUP, COUNTIF, SUMIFS, and complex nested formulas
• Create entire spreadsheets with multiple sheets, cross-sheet references, and working calculations
• Analyze data and surface trends, outliers, and summaries from existing datasets
• Clean messy data by detecting duplicates, fixing formatting, and standardizing entries
• Build charts and dashboards based on your data with proper formatting
• Write VBA macros for automated workflows and repetitive tasks
• Create financial models with budgets, forecasts, variance analysis, and scenario planning

The real question is which tool creates the least friction and gives you the most value for the price.

How Fello AI Works with Excel

Fello AI is a Mac and iOS app that puts multiple AI models in one place. With version 6.5.0, it introduced Skills, a feature that generates native Office files directly from your chat. The Excel Skill creates professionally formatted .xlsx files with working formulas, styled cells, and multiple sheets when your task calls for it.

Here is how to create a spreadsheet with Fello AI:

1. Open Fello AI on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad
2. Tap the Skills button (tools icon) in the chat input bar
3. Toggle on the Excel Skill
4. Type what you need, for example: “Build a quarterly marketing budget with four sheets (Q1 through Q4). Each sheet should have columns for channel, planned spend, actual spend, and variance. Add a summary sheet with totals.”
5. Fello AI generates the spreadsheet and delivers a downloadable .xlsx file directly in chat
6. Open the file in Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, or any compatible app

The output is a native .xlsx file with real formulas, not static numbers. You own the file and can edit every cell, formula, and format.

What You Can Create with Fello AI’s Excel Skill

The Excel Skill handles practically any spreadsheet you would normally build from scratch. Here are the most common use cases.

Budgets and financial trackers

Monthly budgets, annual financial plans, expense trackers, and cash flow projections. Tell Fello AI your categories (housing, food, transport, subscriptions) and it builds a complete workbook with SUM, AVERAGE, and variance formulas across every sheet. You can ask for year-over-year comparison rows, conditional formatting that highlights overspending in red, and a summary dashboard that pulls totals from each monthly sheet automatically.

Project dashboards

Multi-sheet workbooks with project timelines, resource allocation, task tracking, and status summaries. Each sheet can cover a different project phase or team, and cross-sheet references pull data into a master dashboard so you always see the full picture. Ask for Gantt-chart-style date tracking, percentage completion columns, or RAG status indicators and Fello AI builds them with the right formulas.

Sales and revenue reports

Complete sales tracking systems with columns for date, salesperson, product, quantity, unit price, and total revenue. Fello AI can add a summary sheet that calculates totals by salesperson, by product, and by region using SUMIFS formulas. You can also ask for month-over-month growth rates, running totals, and ranked leaderboards, all with working formulas, not static numbers.

Inventory management

Stock trackers with automated reorder point calculations, minimum stock alerts using conditional formatting, cost-of-goods-sold formulas, and turnover rate columns. Upload an existing inventory file and ask Fello AI to add new tracking columns, flag items below reorder level, or create a separate sheet that summarizes stock value by category.

Client invoices and billing

Professional invoice templates with line items, quantity, rate, subtotal, tax calculations, and grand totals. Every number is formula-driven so you just update the inputs and the rest recalculates. You can ask for multiple invoice sheets in one workbook, a running invoice log, or a payment tracking sheet with due dates and status columns.

Data analysis workbooks

Upload a CSV or existing spreadsheet and ask Fello AI to group, analyze, and summarize the data. It can create pivot-style summaries, segment customers by age range or geography, calculate averages and medians per group, identify outliers, and add trend columns. If you need to clean the data first, just describe what is wrong (“remove duplicates in column A, standardize date format in column C”) and Fello AI handles it.

HR and team management

Employee directories, shift schedules, time-off trackers, and performance review templates. Fello AI can build a workbook where each team has its own sheet, with a master sheet that consolidates headcount, average tenure, and PTO balances using cross-sheet formulas.

You can also upload an existing .xlsx file and ask Fello AI to add columns, fix broken formulas, create new summary sheets, restructure the layout, or merge data from multiple files, all without opening Excel.

Why Fello AI Beats Copy-Pasting from ChatGPT

When you use ChatGPT or Claude to help with Excel, you get text output: a formula, a VBA script, or a table you need to manually copy into your spreadsheet. That works for one-off formula help, but it falls apart when you need a complete spreadsheet with multiple sheets, cross-references, and consistent formatting.

Fello AI skips the copy-paste cycle entirely. It produces actual .xlsx files with real formulas, formatted headers, styled cells, and multiple sheets. The file is ready to use the moment you download it.

There are three other advantages worth knowing about:

Multiple AI models in one app. Fello AI gives you access to GPT-5.4, Claude, and Gemini without switching between apps or managing separate subscriptions. Use the model that works best for your task, GPT for creative solutions, Claude for detailed analysis, Gemini for data-heavy work.

Works across the entire Office suite. Beyond Excel, Fello AI’s Skills also create Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs. Need a sales report in Excel plus a summary document in Word plus a presentation deck? Create all three in the same conversation.

No Excel subscription required. The .xlsx files Fello AI creates open in Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, or any compatible app. You do not need a Microsoft 365 subscription to create or use the spreadsheets. At $9.99/month, Fello AI costs less than a third of what Copilot Pro plus Microsoft 365 charges.

Best Prompts for Creating Excel Files with AI

The quality of your AI output depends heavily on how you ask. These prompts work in Fello AI (which generates actual .xlsx files), and also in ChatGPT or Claude (which output text you paste into Excel).

Personal budget tracker

“Create a monthly budget spreadsheet with categories for housing, food, transport, entertainment, savings, and other. Include columns for budgeted amount, actual amount, and difference. Add a summary row with totals and a cell that shows whether I’m over or under budget overall.”

Sales dashboard

“Build a sales tracking spreadsheet with columns for date, salesperson, product, quantity, unit price, and total revenue. Add a summary sheet that calculates total revenue by salesperson and by product using SUMIFS formulas.”

Invoice template

“Create a professional invoice template with fields for company name, client name, invoice number, date, line items (description, quantity, rate, amount), subtotal, tax at 21%, and total. Use formulas for all calculations.”

Data analysis

“I have customer data including age, location, purchase amount, and purchase date. Create a spreadsheet that groups customers by age range (18-25, 26-35, 36-45, 46+), calculates average purchase amount per group, and adds a column showing which group each customer belongs to.”

Formula help (for any AI tool)

“Write an Excel SUMIFS formula that adds up all sales in column D where the region in column A is ‘West’ and the date in column B is after January 1, 2026.”

In Fello AI, these prompts generate a downloadable .xlsx file. In ChatGPT or Claude, you get text formulas to copy into Excel.

How Fello AI Handles Word and PowerPoint Too

One of the biggest advantages of using Fello AI for your spreadsheet workflow is that it is not limited to Excel. The same Skills feature handles all major Office formats.

Word documents. Create reports, proposals, meeting notes, cover letters, and any document type with proper heading hierarchy, formatted tables, and consistent styling. The Word Skill generates native .docx files you can open in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Apple Pages. You can also upload an existing .docx file and ask Fello AI to revise, extend, or reformat it. Check out our full guide on using AI in Word for step-by-step examples of what you can create.

PowerPoint presentations. Describe what your presentation needs to cover, the audience, the number of slides, and the tone, and Fello AI builds a .pptx file with proper slide layouts, content structure, and speaker notes. It handles everything from quarterly business reviews to sales pitches to training decks. You can also upload an existing presentation and ask Fello AI to add slides, restructure the flow, or rewrite the content. For more, see our guide to creating presentations with AI.

PDF files. Generate PDFs for reports, invoices, contracts, and documents that need to look the same on every device. Fello AI can also analyze existing PDFs, extract specific data points, summarize long documents, and create new files based on the content. Upload a 50-page PDF report and ask for a one-page executive summary as a Word document, Fello AI handles the entire workflow.

The real power is combining Skills in one conversation. You can build a budget spreadsheet in Excel, generate a financial summary report in Word based on that data, and create a board presentation in PowerPoint, all without leaving the chat. Each file uses native Office formats with real formatting and formulas.

Where to Get Fello AI

Fello AI is available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. You can download it from the App Store or learn more on the Fello AI FAQ page. The app costs $9.99/month and includes access to all AI models and all Skills (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDF).

There is no free tier for the Skills features, but the app comes with a free trial so you can test spreadsheet creation before committing. Fello AI has a 4.7-star rating with 25K+ reviews a syncs across all your Apple devices.

Other AI Tools for Excel

Microsoft Copilot Pro ($20/month + M365 subscription). The most seamless option if you want AI directly inside Excel. Copilot can generate formulas, analyze data, create charts, and clean messy data without leaving the app. The Edit with Copilot feature (formerly Agent Mode, generally available since January 2026) handles multi-step tasks autonomously and can now create new spreadsheets from scratch. The downside is the price, at least $29.99/month total when combining Copilot Pro ($20/month) with a Microsoft 365 Personal plan ($9.99/month). Learn more at Microsoft’s Copilot page.

ChatGPT (Free / $20 per month for Plus). Excellent for one-off formula help. Describe what you need, get a formula or VBA macro, and paste it into Excel. The free tier handles most formula requests. The limitation is the manual copy-paste workflow and the fact that ChatGPT cannot see your actual spreadsheet data unless you paste it into the chat.

Claude (Free / $20 per month for Pro). Works the same way as ChatGPT for Excel help, write formulas, VBA scripts, and data transformation logic. Claude is particularly strong at explaining complex formulas step by step. Same copy-paste limitation applies.

Google Sheets with Gemini AI (from $19.99/month). If you are flexible about your spreadsheet app, Google Sheets supports Gemini AI for formula help, data analysis, and summarization. Native Gemini integration in Sheets requires a Google AI Pro subscription ($19.99/month) or a Google Workspace Business plan. You can export as .xlsx to open in Excel, though some formatting may shift.

Numerous.ai (from $8/month billed annually) and GPT for Work (pay-per-use). Third-party add-ins that put AI functions directly inside Excel or Google Sheets cells. Useful for bulk text processing like categorizing, summarizing, or extracting data from text columns.

AI in Excel: Pricing Comparison

Tool	Monthly Cost	Creates .xlsx Files	Multiple AI Models	Best For
Fello AI	$9.99/month	Yes (downloadable)	Yes (GPT-5.4, Claude, Gemini)	Full spreadsheet creation, Office suite
Microsoft Copilot Pro	$20/month + M365	No (edits existing)	No (Microsoft AI only)	In-Excel editing, agent mode
Copilot for Business	$18–21/user/month + M365	No (edits existing)	Ne	Teams, enterprise features
ChatGPT Free	Free	No (copy-paste)	Ne	Quick formula help
ChatGPT Plus	$20/month	No (copy-paste)	Ne	Advanced formula + VBA help
Claude Pro	$20/month	No (copy-paste)	Ne	Detailed formula explanations
Google Sheets + Gemini	From $19.99/month	No (.xlsx export)	Ne	AI spreadsheet work (paid plan required)
Numerous.ai	From $8/month (annual)	Ne	Ne	Bulk text processing in cells

Závěr

AI transforms Excel from a manual data tool into something you can operate with natural language. You can generate complete spreadsheets, write complex formulas, analyze datasets, and create financial models, all from a simple text prompt.

Fello AI at $9.99/month is the best option for most people. It generates real .xlsx files with working formulas, gives you access to GPT-5.4, Claude, and Gemini in one app, and handles Word, PowerPoint, and PDF files too. If you need AI directly inside Excel and already pay for Microsoft 365, Copilot Pro is the alternative at $20/month extra. For occasional formula help, ChatGPT’s free tier gets the job done.

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