Spreadsheet software that will understand natural-language questions about your data is certainly a cool concept. Microsoft Power BI’s cloud service — its analytics platform, not Excel — has offered this capability for a while, but having it percolate down to spreadsheets will put it before many more potential users.

I’ve been taking Google Sheets Explore for a test drive this afternoon. First thoughts? It’s got a lot of potential, but at the moment I’d caution you not to depend on it to understand exactly what you mean in the same way that, say, Google search can sometimes figure out what you want even if you’ve misspelled a word.

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