50 AI Prompts for Excel: Excel prompt packs for people who'd rather not Google it.

Hey everyone 👋 I'm Soham — I work in HR (comp & benefits, HRIS, the kind of HR role that lives in spreadsheets all day), and this pack came out of pure repetition. I kept hitting the same wall: I'd ask ChatGPT or Claude something like "help me fix this formula" or "help me build a dashboard," and instead of an answer, I'd get three clarifying questions back. Vague prompt, vague response — every time. So I started doing the opposite. Instead of asking broadly, I wrote out the exact prompt for each specific problem I kept running into — a VLOOKUP throwing #N/A, a date column with three different formats in it, a pivot table that breaks the moment someone adds a row — and I tested each one until it gave a working formula, script, or fix on the first try, not the third. 50 prompts later, this is the result. Five categories: Formula writing (lookups, conditional sums, date math, and more) Data cleaning (messy dates, invisible characters, duplicates, currency text) Dashboards (pivot tables, dynamic charts, KPI scorecards, heatmaps) Automation (Apps Script & VBA — auto-emails, backups, alerts, one-click resets) Troubleshooting (every common error, slow sheets, circular references, wrong results) You don't need to know anything about prompting. Just copy the prompt, swap in your column names or paste your broken formula, and go. Each one also gives a plain-English explanation, so you're not just copy-pasting a fix blind — you actually pick up why it works. I built and tested every single one of these on real problems from my own day job, so this isn't theoretical. Would genuinely love your feedback — especially if you try one and it doesn't nail it first try. That's exactly what I want to know. And if there's a specific Excel headache that isn't in here, drop it below — already thinking about what comes next. 🙏