Top 10 AI Excel Tools – Reviewed & Ranked

Best Overall: Julius (18.5/20)

Julius AI performs extremely well across the board and is our pick for an AI Excel tool, especially for advanced users.

Best For New Excel Users: Akkio (18/20)

Akkio has amazing video tutorials and is the best tool for anyone new to Excel and AI Excel tools.

Best Value For Money: Ajelix (17/20)

Ajelix performs well across the board and is very strong for data visualisations. Great value at $6 p.m.

Best Without Data Visualisation: FormulasHQ (14/20 but 14/15 excluding visualisation)

FormulasHQ has amazing tools for data cleaning & analysis but doesn’t offer any data visualisation.

Conclusion

We liked all of these tools. They all offer a remarkable step forward for Excel users.

We’re very conscious that these tools, and artificial intelligence more generally, are evolving very quickly.

We plan to review this market again in future and can’t wait to see how they have evolved and improved.

Think we’ve missed a tool? Great the more the merrier!

Please email us at admin@acuitytraining.co.uk and let us know. We’ll include it in the next test.

Appendix: Testing Methodology

A good tool offers far more than correct formulas.

We also tested them to see:

1. How easy they are to use and set up,
2. How good the explanations they provide are, and
3. How good they are at generating graphs and data visualisations.

To test the formula-creating abilities of these tools we created increasingly complicated scenarios to test the tools.

Testing the other aspects of the Excel AI tools involved setting them all up and using the tools across a number of tasks. While we looked for harder metrics to rank them with we couldn’t find any that we felt were fair.

To test their formula-generating performance, we generated 4 complex queries to see how each tool handled them.

In the grid below a tick is a correct formula, a cross is a wrong formula and a ? is where the AI misunderstood the request.

Query 1:

Let’s set up a table with the following columns:

Order ID: Unique identifier for each order

Product: Name of the product

Quantity: Number of units sold

Unit Price: Price per unit

Total Sales: Quantity * Unit Price

Desired Outcome:

Add a new column to apply a 10% discount to the total sales amount if:

The total sales for an order are greater than $100, and

The price per unit after the discount is applied is more than $100 per unit.

Query 2:

We have a table with the following columns:

Order ID: Unique identifier

Order Status: Pending, Shipped, Delivered

Priority: High, Medium, Low

Desired Outcome:

We want a single formula that applies conditional formatting based on the following logic:

If the Order Status is “Pending” AND the Priority is “High”, highlight the cell in red.

If the Order Status is “Shipped”, highlight the cell in yellow, regardless of the Priority.

Leave all other cells with no specific formatting.

Query 3:

Formula to Calculate Bonus:

Columns: Employee ID, Name, Sales Amount, Sales Target, Bonus Percentage.

Desired Outcome:

Calculate the bonus amount if the sales amount exceeds the sales target.

The bonus is calculated as (Sales Amount – Sales Target) * Bonus Percentage.

Query 4:

Let’s set up a table with the following columns:

Product ID: Unique identifier for each product

Product Name: Name of the product

Current Stock: Current number of units in stock

Minimum Required Stock: Minimum number of units that should be in stock

Reorder Quantity: The number of units to reorder

Restock Status: Indicates whether the product needs to be restocked

Desired Outcome:

Highlight the product name in orange if the current stock is below the minimum required stock.

Calculate the reorder quantity as the difference between the minimum required stock and the current stock if the current stock is below the minimum required stock.

Display “Restock Needed” in the Restock Status column if the product needs to be restocked.