9 Best AI Tools for Excel of 2026

Copilot in Excel is the only tool on this list that ships inside Excel itself, so there is nothing to install. Microsoft's support page lists three modes: edit, which changes the workbook directly, plan, which proposes steps for you to confirm, and chat, which answers questions without touching cells. Copilot works with tables, charts, PivotTables and formulas across multiple sheets, can search the web with citations, and can pull data from other workbooks on OneDrive, SharePoint or your computer. Custom skills, including ones you record by demonstrating a task, cover repeat jobs. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year and adds the desktop Office apps and 1 TB of storage. The gaps are on mobile: edit mode is still rolling out on iPad and iPhone, and Android gets chat mode only. In the Family plan, Copilot is for the subscription owner only. We compared documented features and published prices.

ChatGPT for Excel is an add-in that opens ChatGPT in a sidebar next to your workbook, and OpenAI's help center says it can build, update and explain large multi-tab files with formulas, references and assumptions. You install it from the Microsoft Marketplace in Excel desktop or web and sign in with your ChatGPT account. It is available to Free, Go, Plus and Pro users as well as business plans, which makes it the easiest way to try an Excel AI add-in at no cost, though Free and Go get limited usage and Plus and Pro draw from an agentic usage limit. You can @ mention sheets, ask for a plan before big edits, and use Skills and apps. A version for Google Sheets works the same way. OpenAI lists limits: spreadsheet chats do not sync with your main history or memory, and VBA and macros may not be fully supported. We compared documented features and published prices.

Claude for Excel is an add-in from Anthropic, installed from Microsoft AppSource, and its help center describes it as built for model work: ask questions about an open workbook, adjust assumptions while keeping formula relationships intact, debug errors back to their root cause, and build or populate models across tabs. Every answer comes with cell-level citations you can click to jump to the referenced cell, which is useful when you need to check how a number was derived. It runs in Excel on Windows with Microsoft 365, on Mac and on the web, and it is part of Claude for Microsoft 365 alongside PowerPoint, Word and Outlook. The add-in requires Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise; Pro costs $17 a month billed annually or $20 monthly. Excel 2016 and 2019, iPad and Android are not supported, and Anthropic warns users to open only trusted spreadsheets because files can carry hidden instructions. We compared documented features and published prices.

GPTExcel is a web app rather than an add-in: you upload an Excel or CSV file, ask in plain English, and get formulas, pivot tables, charts, slide decks and summaries back. Its pricing page lists a Pivot Builder and a Slide Deck Builder agent plus generators for formulas, scripts, SQL, regex and templates on every plan. The free plan gives 50 credits a month and 5 free tool runs a day with files up to 5 MB. Pro costs $9 a month, the lowest verified paid price here, for about 3,000 credits a month and files up to 50 MB, 20 per chat. Pro Plus at $18 a month adds Expert models and 100 MB files. The tradeoffs: you move files to the browser instead of working in the open workbook, paid credits refresh weekly and do not roll over, and heavy use is paced over 5-hour windows. We compared documented features and published prices.

Julius AI is a data analysis workspace: you bring spreadsheets or data files and ask questions, and it runs the analysis, draws charts and turns results into reports, dashboards or presentations. Its pricing page lists Google Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint connectors on every plan, which matters for Excel users because that is where most workbooks live. Plus is listed at $20 a month with 2,000 credits, 100 daily refresh credits, 16 GB of RAM and access to frontier models such as GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5. Pro at $45 a month raises that to 5,000 credits and 32 GB of RAM. Business at $450 a month adds Postgres, BigQuery and Snowflake and up to 50 members. Julius is SOC 2 Type II certified. It does not run inside Excel, and files are kept for 7 days on paid plans below Enterprise, so it suits analysis jobs more than editing a live workbook. We compared documented features and published prices.

Formula Bot, whose old excelformulabot.com address now redirects to betteranalyst.com, is now called Better Analyst; the company says accounts and workflows carried over. You upload an .xlsx, .xls or .csv file, ask a question in plain English, and it returns analysis, charts, Excel dashboards you can download and new or cleaned spreadsheets, and it still writes formulas. The free plan includes 10 chat messages and 100 AI credits a month with one connected data source. Pro costs $30 a month billed monthly, with annual billing saving up to 33%, and adds unlimited chat, unlimited data sources such as Google Sheets, BigQuery, Snowflake and Power BI, 3,000 AI credits for bulk jobs and daily-refreshed dashboards. Team covers 5 people for $149 a month with free viewers. It is a web tool rather than an Excel add-in, and bulk tasks such as PDF to Excel use 10 credits per page. We compared documented features and published prices.

Gemini in Sheets is not an Excel add-in, but it belongs on this list for teams that keep spreadsheets in Google Workspace. Google's help center says you open an Excel file, choose File, Save as Google Sheets, then click Ask Gemini at the top right to open a side panel with suggested prompts or your own. Gemini can work across several tabs in one prompt, you can limit it to chosen tabs from a dropdown, and actions it takes can be undone. Google says the feature needs an eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plan, and the Workspace comparison table shows that some plans do not include it, so check the tier before you buy. We could not confirm a USD price from our location, so pricing is marked pending. For Excel-first users the extra step is converting each file before Gemini can read it. We compared documented features and published prices.

Shortcut is an AI spreadsheet agent aimed at finance teams, and its pricing page lists an Excel plugin, a Google Sheets plugin, a web app and a Windows desktop app on every plan, including Free. The free tier gives 20 credits a week, which is enough to test it on a real model. Pro costs $100 a month billed annually and adds 1,000 monthly credits, unlimited file creation and edits and Platform API access. Teams costs $320 a month plus $100 per seat with pooled credits, a shared workspace, usage analytics and centralized billing. Shortcut lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and Enterprise adds SSO, custom permissions and bring-your-own-key. Credits are the catch: Shortcut says a message typically uses 2 to 15 credits depending on complexity, so heavy users can burn through 1,000 credits quickly. It is the priciest individual plan on this list. We compared documented features and published prices.

Numerous.ai takes a different approach from the chat assistants above: it adds an =AI function you type into any cell in Google Sheets or Excel, so a prompt can run down a whole column. The vendor positions it for bulk text work such as writing ad copy and SEO keywords, summarizing survey answers, classifying content into categories and cleaning messy input. It needs no API keys, and Numerous.ai says it caches results to avoid duplicate queries. The pricing page lists 1 million characters of ChatGPT inputs and outputs per person, priority email support and video onboarding on request, with a 7-day trial for $1 and savings of 57% on yearly billing. Remaining tokens are kept if you cancel. We could not read the plan price as text from our location, so pricing is marked pending. It is not the tool for building financial models or charts. We compared documented features and published prices.