Streamline bloated spreadsheets with AI-powered data

Streamline bloated spreadsheets with AI-powered data extraction

Managing large Excel files can be a challenge, especially when combining multiple sources like CSV and Excel files.

March 30, 20263 min readMicrosoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community

This user's story is a perfect example of how far Excel can be pushed before it starts pushing back. The 55 MB file, the careful dance of "connection only" queries, the pivot-table filters designed to keep the full dataset at bay, this is not a workflow problem. It is a tool-limitation problem. And it is one that an AI-native approach to spreadsheets is built to solve.

The core issue here is that Excel treats every data source as something to be imported, stored, and managed within a single file. When you are pulling from 50 CSV and Excel files, even if you only need two columns from the fourth sheet of each, the overhead accumulates. Every query, every connection, every cached result adds weight. The user has done the right things to minimize that weight, connection-only loads, pivot-table retrieval, aggressive filtering, but they are still fighting against a fundamental architectural constraint. The file is 55 MB not because of the data they need, but because of the scaffolding required to access it.

An AI-powered spreadsheet, by contrast, treats data as a live stream rather than a stored artifact. Instead of loading and compressing 50 files into one bloated container, the tool keeps the external references intact and only materializes the specific cells needed for a given calculation or analysis. The user's current practice of pulling only two columns from each file is exactly the kind of selective extraction that AI-native tools handle natively. There is no need to cache the entire fourth sheet when only two columns are ever requested. The result is a file that stays small, responsive, and focused on the output rather than the infrastructure.

What this user needs is not a better Excel trick, they have already found the best ones. They need a tool that rethinks the relationship between the spreadsheet and its data sources. The goal should be to let the user describe what they want (the average of column B from the fourth sheet of each of these 50 files) and have the tool execute that without ever inflating the workbook to 55 MB. That is not a futuristic vision; it is a practical shift in how data extraction and computation are designed. The user's current approach is careful and smart. The next step is to find a tool that rewards that care with speed, not bloat.

From Microsoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community

I am using excel to combine other excel files and to do calculations on them, including average, std, but also more personalised equations (hence PP). Specifically, the purpose is to have "database" because I work with a lot of csv and excle files that I constantly need too extract information from (e.g. 50 files in all of which I only need 2 columns in 4th sheet), pain without PQ. Currently I am doing "create connection only" when loading queries, and I retrieve them using pivot table with filters, so at no point all of the information is retrieved. I am…

Streamline massive forecasts with smarter data organization.

I work with data sets that I typically look at forecast by year. Currently when I look at 2026 and 2027 it is rougly 1.4M lines of data. I have to put these in two separate data pulls and tables. Then I have six different customers included in this data. so I have to create 6 tabs with six diffrent pivot tables for them to look at. This has created a massive file that lags just to open, save or close so I really have two questions and am open to suggestions. Would it be better to store the data in one worksheet and then link a second worksheet that just has the pivot tables and separated look? If so how would I creat that link? Can you explain to me like I am 5 how I would use power query to combine the 26 and 27 table so that they could be in the same pivot table? Every column in both are identical. submitted by /u/dcal69 [link] [comments]

Simplify Purchase Order Updates with Smarter Shared Spreadsheets

I have a file with details of open purchase orders. PO numbers are in the rows and there are several columns with various PO details. It is linked via PQ to two other files. It is used by multiple buyers and I'd like to dumb it down as much as possible. I need to be able to do two things that I haven't figured out yet: Each buyer is responsible for updating delivery ETAs on their open purchases. These are updated at different times for a each vendor throughout the week. In the shared file that we previously used, buyers had a sheet for each vendor and we used VLOOKUPS to pull data from these sheets. Obviously, that doesn't work with a PQ chart. Is there a solution to this that I'm not thinking of? I need a column where buyers can manually add notes to each cell. submitted by /u/free-range-human [link] [comments]

Speed Up a Heavy WPS Spreadsheet Without Losing Your Flow

Running WPS Spreadsheets on an older PC and hitting some frustrating sluggishness on a particularly heavy spreadsheet. Lots of data, a fair number of formulas, and some pivot tables and the whole thing crawls when scrolling or making edits. Picked WPS Office specifically because of its reputation for being lightweight compared to MS Office but the performance on this file suggests lightweight doesn't mean fast when the document itself is demanding enough. In Excel there's a Performance tab in the options that gives you some control over calculation settings, hardware acceleration, and other performance related behavior that can make a meaningful difference on heavy files. I'm trying to figure out if WPS Spreadsheets has equivalent settings worth knowing about or if there are other approaches that help with performance on demanding files specifically. submitted by /u/metamorphoasis [link] [comments]