"Hey Claude, what's the total from this file?
> grep for headers
> "Ah, I see column 3 is the price value"
> SUM(C2:C) -> $2020
> "Great! I found your total!"
If you can find me an example of tech that can solve this at scale on large, diverse Excel formats, then I'll concede, but I haven't found something actually trustworthy for important data sets
Not really. Take for example:
item, date, price
abc, 01/01/2023, $30
cde, 02/01/2023, $40
... 100k rows ...
subtotal. $1000
def, 03/01,2023, $20
"Hey Claude, what's the total from this file? > grep for headers > "Ah, I see column 3 is the price value" > SUM(C2:C) -> $2020 > "Great! I found your total!"
If you can find me an example of tech that can solve this at scale on large, diverse Excel formats, then I'll concede, but I haven't found something actually trustworthy for important data sets
That's a basic tool call that current models already can do well. All the sql query generation LLMs can do this for example.