10 Best AI Tools for Excel and Google Sheets

1. Microsoft Copilot in Excel: Best AI built into Excel

• Starting price: Microsoft 365 Personal $9.99/mo or $99.99/yr; Premium $19.99/mo
• Free plan: No, Copilot in the desktop apps needs a subscription
• Best for: people who already live in Excel and store files on OneDrive or SharePoint

Copilot sits in the Excel ribbon and suggests formula columns, builds charts and PivotTables, and highlights trends in your data. Microsoft says Personal, Family and Premium plans get the Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop apps “enhanced with Copilot”, and third-party reports say Agent Mode, which makes multi-step edits for you, became the default experience in April 2026. Your workbook must be saved on OneDrive or SharePoint for Copilot to work.

The new =COPILOT function lets you call AI inside a cell, for example =COPILOT(“Classify this feedback as positive, neutral or negative”, B2). Microsoft lists it for Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows and Mac, the web and iPhone, currently in preview channels. Limits are real: up to 100 COPILOT calculations every 10 minutes, it only sees the cells you pass to it, results can change when the sheet recalculates, and Microsoft itself recommends normal formulas for arithmetic. Business users pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot Business ($21 per user a month on annual billing, shown at an $18 promo) or Enterprise ($30). See our Microsoft Copilot pricing guide for every tier.

Skip it if: you use Google Sheets or keep files only on your local drive.

2. ChatGPT for Excel and Google Sheets: Best free AI add-in

• Starting price: Free; Go $8/mo; Plus $20/mo
• Free plan: Yes, limited usage on Free and Go
• Best for: formulas, cleanup, explanations and quick charts in either app

OpenAI’s official add-in puts ChatGPT in a sidebar inside Excel (desktop or web, from Microsoft Marketplace) and Google Sheets (from the Google Workspace Marketplace, then the Extensions menu). OpenAI says it is available globally to Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, Edu and K-12 users. It handles formulas, references, budgets, cleaning messy sheets, scenarios, charts and multi-tab workbooks, and keeps spreadsheet chats separate from your main ChatGPT history.

VBA and macros “may not be fully supported”, and OpenAI tells you to review formulas and changed cells before sharing. For a full walkthrough, read how to use ChatGPT for Excel and data analysis; for plan limits, see our ChatGPT pricing guide.

Skip it if: your company blocks third-party add-ins or consumer AI accounts.

3. Claude for Excel: Best for financial models and debugging

• Starting price: Claude Pro $20/mo or $17/mo billed annually
• Free plan: No, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise only
• Best for: analysts, founders and accountants working with complex, multi-tab models

Claude for Excel is generally available on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans and runs on Excel for the web, Windows (Microsoft 365) and Mac. Its standout feature is cell-level citations: ask “how is the revenue in C42 calculated?” and Claude answers with clickable links to the cells involved. It can change an assumption, such as a discount rate, while keeping formula relationships intact, trace #REF! and #DIV/0! errors to their root cause, build a model from a description, and handle sorting, filtering, pivot tables, conditional formatting and data validation.

Anthropic is candid about limits: no data tables, no macros or VBA, not for audit-critical numbers without verification, and a warning to use it only with trusted files because hidden instructions in external spreadsheets can manipulate it. Usage counts against your normal Claude limits. Our Claude pricing guide explains Pro vs Max.

Skip it if: you work mostly in Google Sheets, which Claude for Excel does not cover.

4. Gemini in Google Sheets: Best AI for Google Sheets users

• Starting price: an eligible Google AI plan (AI Pro $19.99/mo) or Workspace Business Standard and up
• Free plan: No
• Best for: teams on Google Workspace and anyone classifying or summarizing text in cells

Google’s =AI function works like this: =AI(“Summarize this review in five words”, A2). It generates text, summarizes, categorizes and analyzes sentiment, and can pull real-time information from Google Search. Google lists clear limits: output is text only, it cannot see the whole spreadsheet or other Drive files, only the first 350 selected cells generate at once, and you cannot undo a generation. Workspace Business Standard and higher also get Enhanced Smart Fill, which spots patterns and fills columns for you.

It requires “an eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plan”. Our guide to using Gemini in Gmail, Docs and Sheets shows the setup, and Gemini pricing covers which plan to buy.

Skip it if: you need AI to edit formulas across a whole workbook; =AI writes text into cells, not models.

5. Julius AI: Best for upload-and-ask data analysis

• Starting price: Plus $20/mo or $16/mo billed annually (2,000 credits)
• Free plan: Yes, a refreshing daily allowance on Julius Lite models
• Best for: marketers, students and analysts who want charts and answers without formulas

Julius is not an add-in. You upload a spreadsheet or connect Google Drive, ask a question in plain English, and it writes and runs the analysis, then returns charts, tables and summaries. It can also turn results into presentations and reports, and schedule recurring runs. Higher tiers unlock stronger models: Plus includes GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 per its comparison table. Pro costs $45 a month ($37 annual) for 5,000 credits, and Business $450 ($375 annual) for teams of up to 50.

Skip it if: you want changes written back into your original workbook.

6. GPT for Work: Best for bulk AI formulas across thousands of rows

• Starting price: Standard $25/mo (includes $25 of usage)
• Free plan: Free trial credits, no card
• Best for: SEO, ecommerce and ops teams processing large lists

GPT for Work (known for its GPT for Sheets and GPT for Excel add-ins) adds AI functions you can drag down a column: write 2,000 product descriptions, translate a catalog, categorize support tickets or extract names from messy text. A subscription unlocks all models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1, and usage is billed at the AI providers’ token rates plus a service margin. Business seats cost $45 a month and support bring-your-own API keys.

Because you pay by tokens, test on 20 rows before running 20,000. Our guide on estimating AI API costs shows the arithmetic.

Skip it if: you only need occasional help with a formula; the free ChatGPT add-in is enough.

7. Shortcut: Best autonomous Excel agent

• Starting price: Pro $100/mo billed annually (1,000 credits)
• Free plan: Yes, 20 credits a week
• Best for: finance and consulting teams building models from scratch

Shortcut calls itself “a superhuman AI Excel agent”. Instead of answering questions, it builds and edits whole workbooks from instructions, such as a three-statement model or a cleaned and formatted data set. It runs on the web, a Windows desktop app, an Excel add-in and a Google Sheets plugin, plus an API. Messages typically use 2 to 15 credits depending on complexity, so the free 20 credits a week give you a handful of real tasks.

Skip it if: $100 a month is more than the time it saves you; Claude for Excel covers many modeling jobs for $20.

8. Rows: Best AI-native spreadsheet

• Starting price: Plus $8/user/mo or $6 annual (200 AI tasks)
• Free plan: Yes, 5 AI tasks a month, free forever
• Best for: marketers and founders who want live data from ads, analytics and CRMs in one sheet

Rows is a spreadsheet built around AI and integrations. Its AI Analyst answers questions about your data, builds summaries and charts, and its AI Vision reads PDFs and images into tables. Data Tables pull in live data from connected tools and refresh daily on Plus or every minute on Pro ($79 plus $8 per user monthly, or $59 plus $6 annual). Each message to the AI Analyst counts as one AI task.

Skip it if: your company standardizes on Excel files; Rows imports them but works best as your main spreadsheet.

9. Better Analyst (formerly Formula Bot): Best for dashboards from spreadsheets

• Starting price: Starter $20/mo (250 chat messages)
• Free plan: Yes, “free forever plan included” (limits not listed)
• Best for: small businesses that want AI dashboards and recurring reports

Formula Bot, a popular formula generator, has rebranded: its site now says “Formula Bot is now Better Analyst”, with the same accounts. It connects spreadsheets, databases and cloud files, answers questions, builds AI dashboards, enriches data and produces reports and presentations. Max costs $40 per user a month with unlimited chat, and Business $80 per user with more data sources and hourly data flows.

Skip it if: you only wanted a quick formula writer; any chatbot now does that for free.

10. Numerous.ai: Best budget AI functions in cells

• Starting price: about $10/mo billed yearly (per its pricing page)
• Free plan: No, a $1 seven-day trial
• Best for: individuals who want ChatGPT-style functions in Sheets or Excel cheaply

Numerous adds AI functions to Google Sheets and Excel for writing, categorizing and generating formulas, and its pricing page lists plans at about $10 a month billed annually, with 500,000 characters and 500 formula generations on the personal tier. The page showed identical figures for several plans, so confirm the exact plan details at checkout.

Skip it if: you need enterprise controls or audit trails.