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This article introduces a tool that might transform how you work with spreadsheets: the seamless integration of advanced AI capabilities brought by GPT models like ChatGPT straight into your spreadsheet cells and data. The cake’s icing: this tool is extremely easy to install and intuitive to use.

Let’s uncover how, by introducing some simple but high-impact use cases, with a combined focus on trying different language tasks and leveraging task automation.

Setting Up

First, install the GPT for Sheets and Docs Google Chrome extension (the actual name of the tool is GPT for work, as shown on its website).

Once the extension has been installed, it should be automatically available in Google Sheets. Simply create a new spreadsheet or open an existing one of your own. To illustrate some use cases in this article, we will use an existing spreadsheet from our previous tutorial: using LLMs for automated data categorization in Google Sheets. But rest assured: you can definitely try out the following use cases with your own spreadsheet data.

If the extension was installed correctly, it should show up in the Extensions drop-down menu on the top toolbar.

GPT Extension in Google Sheets

By clicking on Open, a pane will show up on the right-hand side, with useful documentation about the catalog of GPT functions and use cases available for use. Each function includes examples through links to the official documentation site.

List of GPT spreadsheet functions

Example Use Cases

To start simply, we will exemplify the use of the central function in this library: GPT(). It takes one mandatory argument, namely the prompt describing the user request, just like you would do in ChatGPT. Here is an example:

=GPT("Write an attractive blog post title for travelling to Osaka in 2025")

After a couple of seconds of sending your prompt to a GPT model and processing it to generate the response, it will appear on your cell:

Prompting a GPT model from Google Sheets

Instead of writing the prompt text directly inside the GPT() function, you can also reference any cell with existing content in your spreadsheet — just like when using any other spreadsheet function — and use the content of that cell as your prompt.

Let’s see through an example where we will use:

=GPT(A9)

Depending on the specific GPT model being prompted — we are using a default one in our examples — and the text passed in as prompt, the model will analyze the text and figure out the type of request (language task) required. If no clear request is specified, like “create”, “translate”, “summarize”, question-answering, and so on, and the cell simply contains factual information, the response will most likely consist in generating additional text that follows the one in your prompt.

In our example, the referenced cell A9 contains a fact about Tokyo’s Pokemon Cafe, so the GPT model will reply by generating follow-up information.

Prompting a GPT model from Google Sheets

If you look at it closely — and have by chance visited this picturesque cafe — you may notice the information generated is not bad at all! Seemingly fact-based and coherent with the prompt’s content taken as a starting point. This is an interesting and effective way to automate tasks like text completion in your spreadsheets.

You can also combine a manual prompt and referenced cells’ content, which is extremely useful in combination with spreadsheets’ formulae drag-down to apply a single request to multiple cells at once:

• Your manual prompt may include a clear and specific request about content in your cells. Alternatively, this request can also be in another existing cell, and be referenced by using a syntax like ‘$A$1$ or similar, so that it is replicated when you drag down your function to multiple cells.
• Your referenced cells contain the pieces of text on which a common language task specified in the manual prompt will be executed.

Let’s copy and paste the three input examples a bit further down in our spreadsheet, and apply a common task to all of them.

=GPT("Translate to Spanish", A14)

Specifying a task to perform on existing content in cells

Now all that remains is dragging your formula down to automatically translate the remaining pieces of content:

Dragging formulae down to automate multiple GPT tasks

Wrapping Up

This article introduced an easy-to-install approach that may revolutionize the way Google Sheets users perform daily tasks: the integration of GPT models like ChatGPT in spreadsheet workflows. By navigating the most basic and central function of this tool, we have illustrated the capabilities to leverage the use of GPT’s AI capabilities — namely language understanding and language generation — in your spreadsheet operations.

Bear in mind the article just showed the tip of the iceberg, and there are quite a few more specialized functions in this enthralling tool to further explore its capabilities.