alt Hacker NewsI've experimented with ChatGPT for spreadsheets the past 6 months, and while the results look nice now it has been excruciatingly slow for even the simplest spreadsheet. I'm talking 15-20 minutes to make some pretty basic calculator with graphs. IIRC, it used a lot of time purely on the styling.
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Adding a tangential anecdote.
I asked GPT-5.4 High to draw up an architecture diagram in SVG and left it running. It took over an hour to generate something and had some spacing wrong, things overlapping, etc. I thought it was stuck, but it actually came back with the output.
Then I asked it to make it with HTML and CSS instead, and it made a better output in five seconds (no arrows/lines though).
SVG looks similar to the XML format of spreadsheets. I wonder if LLMs struggle with that?
Engineer on ChatGPT for Excel here. Useful feedback. We have improved the latency inside the add-in a lot and a lot more to come. We also have the Fast, Standard and Heavy thinking modes, where you can adjust the thinking time depending on the task complexity. Curious to hear your feedback once you try this out!