AI for Daily Productivity: Spreadsheet Formula Example

Here's another AI "daily use" I came across yesterday for getting stuff done faster when working up a new spreadsheet.

I was helping someone with rough budgeting and wanted to round up the highlighted cell. I've used rounding before but forgot the Google Sheets syntax for it because it was so long ago.

Instead of Googling it, applying it to my formula and debugging it, I realised I could just get AI to change the existing formula for me and save a few minutes.

So I gave it this screenshot and asked it to change the formula to round up to the nearest $10.

It gave me back the new formula, ready for that specific cell, and I just copied/pasted the result and moved on.

In applying the result, I remembered that it wasn't ROUNDUP but CEILING, which would definitely have added a cycle to my re-learning.

Doing this 5-10 times a day with similar small tasks can easily save you an hour a day, at least for me.

Post-thought: It occurred to me that I should have used Gemini (Google's equivalent to Microsoft Copilot) which should save me the copy/paste bits in theory. I'll try that and report back.

Here's the actual conversation:

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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