How to Add ChatGPT to Google Sheets

Anthropic recently dropped Claude for Excel, which flew somewhat under the radar for a few reasons. One, it’s in Excel and a lot of teams are transitioning to Sheets, and two, it’s not that good yet and relatively slow. Now OpenAI shipped an official ChatGPT app that lives right inside Sheets and edits your spreadsheet for you. It’s actually decent, but I’m not blown away by it.

It runs as a sidebar with a chat interface. Here’s how to set it up and some good and bad use cases for it.

How to Install It

The whole thing takes a couple of minutes and just needs a ChatGPT account.

• Open the official ChatGPT app on the Google Workspace Marketplace and click Install. (Or from inside a sheet: Extensions → Add-ons → Get add-ons, then search “ChatGPT.”)
• Approve the permissions — it needs access to the spreadsheets you open it in.
• Open any sheet, then go to Extensions → ChatGPT → Open. A sidebar shows up on the right.
• Sign in with your OpenAI account. It works on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, plus Business, Enterprise, and Edu.
• Type what you want into the sidebar and go.

A couple of things worth knowing up front: the spreadsheet chat is separate from your normal ChatGPT history, and there’s no memory between sessions — which can be quite frustrating, since it has to re-understand the entire spreadsheet each time you open it up.

What to Use It For

The extension makes direct, in-line edits — not just vibe-coding an entire workbook from scratch, but going and fixing the thing you point it at. A few uses where it’s genuinely great:

• One-off complex formulas. Nested INDEX/MATCH or ARRAYFORMULA you’d burn 30 minutes on.
• Ad hoc analysis. You don’t care about repeating this analysis, you just care about the output.
• Templates and scaffolding. Need a clean budget tab, a tracker, or a starting layout? It’ll build a formatted sheet with formulas already in place so you’re not staring at a blank grid.
• In-line edits. Point it at a single cell or range and have it fix just that — clean up the labels in column B, edit this formula, fix these errors.

Where Not to Use It

Don’t let it build your full model. I know it can — ask it for a three-statement model or a DCF and it’ll hand you something that looks complete and totally vibe-coded and colorful. But the entire point of building a model isn’t the output. It’s knowing the drivers and the assumptions cold, because the whole point of building a model is to help you make better strategic business decisions.

If AI vibe-codes the whole thing, you end up with a number you didn’t reason your way to. When someone asks “why does this assume 12% growth?” or “what happens if churn doubles?”, “ChatGPT made it” is not an answer. Build the structure yourself so the logic lives in your head, and use ChatGPT for the pieces — the formula you can’t remember, the quick sanity check on a calculation, and so on.

Whatever You Use It For, Check Its Work

Here’s the catch with a tool that edits your cells directly: it will confidently write a formula that looks right and is quietly off by a row, or change a cell you didn’t mean for it to touch. The app tells you what it changed in the moment, but it’s hard to audit and confirm it did what you asked (and only what you asked).

So whether ChatGPT wrote the formula or you did, you need to be able to trace it — see what feeds a cell (precedents) and what depends on it (dependents) before you trust the number. AI-generated formulas are long, dense, and cross-tab, which makes them hard to sort through.

This is where XLKeys comes in handy. It’s a free Chrome extension that adds Excel-style formula auditing right inside Google Sheets. Click any cell ChatGPT wrote, hit Trace Precedents, and you get a clean list of every cell and range it pulls from — even across tabs — that you can step through and jump to. Hit Trace Dependents to see everything riding on an assumption before you change it. It’s the difference between hoping the AI got it right and actually checking.