OpenAI has released a beta version of ChatGPT for Excel, an add-in that lets users ask questions, build models and analyze data inside a spreadsheet using plain language instead of hand-written formulas. The company announced the tool alongside its GPT-5.4 model in early March 2026.
The add-in runs on GPT-5.4 Thinking, OpenAI’s latest reasoning model, and works directly inside Excel workbooks. According to OpenAI, users can describe what they want in ordinary sentences, and the assistant drafts the formulas, structures the model and explains its work within the spreadsheet rather than in a separate chat window.
Aimed at finance professionals
OpenAI is pitching the tool squarely at financial analysts and modelers. The company says the beta includes integrations with several widely used market data providers, including FactSet, S&P Global, Moody’s and LSEG, so that users can pull financial data into a workbook and analyze it without leaving Excel.
Spreadsheet-heavy tasks such as building valuation models, reconciling figures and preparing scenario analyses have long been a target for AI vendors, because the work is repetitive but demands precision. By placing the assistant inside the workbook, OpenAI is competing with Microsoft’s own Copilot features in Excel as well as with a range of smaller add-ins that already offer natural-language formula help.
Availability
The beta is available to paying ChatGPT subscribers in the United States, Canada and Australia, OpenAI said. The company also said it is developing a version for Google Sheets, though it did not give a release date.
The Excel release is part of a broader push by OpenAI to embed its models into the everyday tools that knowledge workers already use. GPT-5.4, announced on March 5, was positioned by the company as a model for enterprise and agentic workloads, with the Excel add-in serving as one of its first productivity use cases.
OpenAI has not published independent benchmarks for the add-in’s accuracy on financial modeling tasks, so its claims about speed and reliability remain the company’s own for now. As with other generative AI tools used in finance, analysts will still need to check the formulas and assumptions the assistant produces before relying on them.
