Best AI Tools for Excel & Google Sheets in 2026

Microsoft Copilot is natively embedded in Excel for Microsoft 365 subscribers — no plugin required. Highlight a column of messy data, ask Copilot to "clean this list and flag duplicates," and it does. Ask it to "create a PivotTable showing revenue by region sorted descending" and the PivotTable appears. Copilot can generate complex nested formulas from plain English ("IF sales > target, show green, else red"), write VBA macros, and produce written summaries of your data (useful for executive reports). For organizations already on Microsoft 365, Copilot is the fastest way to close the gap between what Excel can do and what most users actually know how to do.

Google's Gemini AI is built into Google Sheets for Workspace Business Standard users and above. The Help me organize feature generates a full table structure from a text prompt — describe your project tracker and Sheets builds it with headers, formulas, and conditional formatting. The 'Help me write a formula' sidebar turns natural language into Sheets formulas with an explanation of what each part does. Gemini can also analyze data ranges and produce written summaries directly in a cell. For teams living in Google Workspace, Gemini in Sheets removes the friction of formula lookup and data wrangling that slows down everyone except spreadsheet power users.

Formula Bot does one thing exceptionally well: it converts plain English into Excel and Google Sheets formulas. Type "average sales from column B where column A says Q1" and get the exact formula with an explanation. It supports XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, INDEX/MATCH, array formulas, and the full range of modern spreadsheet syntax. Beyond formulas, Formula Bot can generate SQL queries, Python pandas code, and even Regex patterns — making it a full data manipulation assistant, not just a formula generator. The SQL-to-spreadsheet bridge is particularly useful: paste a SQL query and get equivalent Excel or Sheets logic. Formula Bot's free tier covers 5 formulas per month; paid plans are affordable for heavy users.

Julius AI is a conversational data analysis tool — upload a CSV, Excel file, or connect Google Sheets, then ask questions in plain English. "Which product category had the fastest growth in Q3?", "Show me a bar chart of monthly revenue by region," "Flag any rows where profit margin is below 5%." Julius handles all of it and shows its work. It generates Python code in the background and shows you the output — charts, cleaned tables, statistical summaries. Unlike Copilot or Gemini, Julius works outside your spreadsheet as a dedicated analysis environment. This is particularly useful for exploratory analysis where you want to iterate quickly without modifying the source file.

Rows is a spreadsheet rebuilt for the AI era — it looks like a spreadsheet but connects natively to APIs, databases, and AI services. The built-in AI Analyst feature lets you chat with your data: "Summarize last month's performance," "Which channels drove the most conversions?" Rows also has native connectors to Stripe, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Notion, and 50+ other tools — meaning you can pull live data into a spreadsheet without any CSV exports. The OPENAI() function lets you call GPT directly inside a cell formula (e.g., classify a list of customer feedback as positive/negative). For data teams who want spreadsheet UX with the power of a full data platform, Rows closes the gap.

Sheet AI is a Google Sheets add-on that brings GPT-powered AI directly into your existing Sheets workflow. Install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace and new AI functions appear in your formula bar: SHEETAI() generates content from a prompt inside any cell, SHEETAI_LIST() expands a topic into a column of items, and SHEETAI_FILL() uses surrounding context to predict and fill in missing values. The use cases are remarkably practical: auto-generate product descriptions from a column of product names, classify customer feedback at scale, translate a list of strings into another language, or summarize long text in an adjacent column. Sheet AI runs inside Sheets so there's no context switching and your data never leaves your spreadsheet.

Airtable sits at the intersection of spreadsheet and database — and its AI layer makes it substantially more powerful than either alone. Airtable AI can summarize long text fields, generate content from templates, categorize data into custom taxonomies, and extract key information from unstructured text. The AI field type lets you run an AI prompt on every row in a table automatically — process 10,000 rows of customer reviews, classify each one by sentiment and category, and roll up the results. For teams managing content calendars, CRM data, project pipelines, or product catalogs, Airtable AI eliminates the manual data wrangling that would otherwise take hours. The AI automation builder can also trigger actions based on AI-classified data.

ChatGPT's Advanced Data Analysis mode (formerly Code Interpreter) turns ChatGPT into a powerful spreadsheet analyst. Upload your Excel or CSV file, then ask questions in plain English — "which rows have missing values?", "create a monthly revenue trend chart," "run a linear regression on columns A and B." ChatGPT writes and executes Python code in the background, returning charts, cleaned datasets, and statistical summaries. You can download the cleaned file when done. While it doesn't integrate natively inside Excel or Sheets, it's the most flexible option — it handles any analysis request you can describe, including complex statistical tests, machine learning predictions, and multi-table joins that require actual code.