AI Spreadsheet Tools in 2026: Copilot, Google Sheets AI, Numerous, and Bricks

April 18, 2026 · Editorial Team · 8 min read · spreadsheets productivity data

Spreadsheets are the most used software in the world by number of users, and also one of the most frustrating. The formula language is archaic. VLOOKUP should not exist in 2026. Building a pivot table requires knowing which axes to drag where. Writing conditional formatting rules that do what you want can take longer than manually doing the thing you wanted to automate.

AI addresses exactly these friction points. The best AI spreadsheet tools let you describe what you want in plain English and produce the formula, formatting rule, or chart configuration without requiring you to know the syntax. For non-technical users, this is a genuine improvement. For technical users, it's a significant time saver for tasks that aren't worth the cognitive overhead of remembering exact syntax.

Here's an honest look at what each major tool actually does, where it breaks down, and what the real cost is.

Microsoft Copilot in Excel: the most ambitious, most expensive

Excel Copilot (part of Microsoft 365 Copilot) is the most feature-complete AI integration in any spreadsheet product. The ambition is significant: it's designed to handle not just formula assistance but analysis, data transformation, visualization, and narrative summary generation.

What Excel Copilot can do:

Formula generation from natural language. Describe what you want ("calculate the 3-month moving average of column B") and it writes the formula. This works well for most common formulas and surprisingly well for complex nested formulas that would take real time to construct manually.

Data analysis without writing code. Select a data range and ask Copilot to find trends, identify outliers, or compare two categories. It generates the analysis and explains the findings in plain language. The quality is good enough to be a starting point for most business analysis tasks, not a final output for anything statistical.

Pivot table generation. This alone is worth money to many users. Describe the summary you want ("show sales by region and product category for Q1, sorted by total revenue") and Copilot creates the pivot table. The setup questions that normally require understanding pivot table mechanics are replaced by a description.

Column transformations. "Create a new column that extracts the year from the date in column C" or "categorize the values in column D as High/Medium/Low based on these thresholds" work reliably.

Where Copilot struggles:

The natural language interface breaks down on ambiguous requests. "Summarize this data" produces a generic summary; "calculate year-over-year growth for each product and highlight cells where growth is below 5%" works much better. You still need to be specific about what you want.

Very large or complex datasets (hundreds of thousands of rows, complex multi-table relationships) sometimes produce incorrect results or time out. Copilot is not a replacement for a proper data analytics pipeline.

The integration requires data to be in a formatted Excel Table (not just a range). If your data is in a plain range, Copilot will prompt you to format it as a table first.

Pricing: Excel Copilot requires Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is $30/user/month on top of an existing Microsoft 365 subscription. For individuals, this is expensive. For enterprise teams that are already on Microsoft 365, the additional cost per user is substantial.

There's no standalone AI tier for Excel. You're paying for the full Copilot suite across all Microsoft 365 apps (Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint). If your team uses all of these, the per-app cost becomes more reasonable. If you mainly need Excel, it's hard to justify.

Google Sheets: AI features without a separate subscription

Google's approach to AI in Sheets is integrated into the core product rather than gated behind a premium tier. The AI features available in 2026 include:

Help Me Organize: describe the structure you want and Gemini generates headers, populates sample rows with formulas, and sets up a template. For starting a new tracking sheet, budget, or data collection form from scratch, this significantly reduces setup time.

Formula assistance: typing a formula and getting AI-generated completion suggestions, with explanations of what each part does. Not as natural language-driven as Copilot but functional.

Smart Fill: recognizes patterns from examples and fills remaining cells. Not strictly AI-powered in the LLM sense, but the pattern recognition has improved substantially.

Duet AI in Sheets (now part of Google Workspace Gemini): for Google Workspace Business and Enterprise customers, more advanced AI features including full formula generation from descriptions, data analysis, and chart generation from natural language descriptions. This tier requires a Google Workspace subscription with Gemini add-on.

The honest assessment: Google Sheets' free AI features are useful but noticeably less capable than Copilot for complex analysis tasks. The formula assistance and Help Me Organize are genuinely helpful, but the depth of analysis capability in the free tier is limited.

For Google Workspace teams that are already paying for Workspace, the Gemini add-on at $20/user/month brings the AI capabilities much closer to Copilot's level. For free consumer Google Sheets users, the free AI features are a nice improvement without being transformative.

Pricing:

Google Sheets (consumer): free, includes basic AI features
Google Workspace (business): starts at $12/user/month for Business Starter
Gemini for Google Workspace add-on: $20/user/month, adds advanced AI features

Numerous: AI formulas as a spreadsheet function

Numerous takes a different approach. Instead of a chat interface or side panel, it adds an AI function directly to your spreadsheet syntax. You use =AI() as a formula in a cell, and the cell executes an AI prompt and displays the result.

This is a genuinely clever design. It means AI outputs integrate into your spreadsheet exactly like any other formula result. You can reference them in other formulas, sort by them, filter on them, and update them by changing the prompt.

Practical use cases where this design shines:

Sentiment classification: Column A has customer review text. Column B formula: =AI("Classify as Positive/Neutral/Negative: "&A2). Drag down to classify hundreds of reviews automatically. Batch processing that would require API code is now a spreadsheet operation.

Entity extraction: column A has messy text fields (names, addresses, descriptions). Column B: =AI("Extract the company name from this text: "&A2). Works with whatever structure the source data has.

Data enrichment: =AI("What industry is this company in: "&A2) where A2 has company names. Approximate but faster than manual lookup for initial categorization.

Categorization and tagging: any classification task where you can describe the categories in natural language can be done at scale with a formula.

The main limitation: each AI call costs tokens, and running the formula across thousands of rows gets expensive quickly. Numerous uses a token-based pricing model, so bulk processing has real cost implications.

What Numerous doesn't do: complex analysis, chart generation, or natural language queries against your full dataset. It's a specialized tool for cell-level AI operations, not a replacement for the analysis features in Copilot or full AI assistants.

Pricing:

Free: 1,000 credits/month (credits correspond to AI calls)
Starter: $19/month, 10,000 credits/month
Growth: $49/month, 50,000 credits/month
Scale: $99/month, unlimited credits

Works with both Excel and Google Sheets. The free tier is enough for testing and small-scale use.

Bricks: the all-in-one AI spreadsheet builder

Bricks is the most ambitious product in this comparison. It positions itself as a replacement for the full spreadsheet workflow, not an add-on to an existing tool. You describe what you want to build (a budget tracker, a project timeline, a sales dashboard) and Bricks generates the entire thing: structure, formulas, charts, and visualizations.

The visual output is genuinely impressive. Bricks generates charts and dashboards that are more polished than what most users would produce manually in Excel or Google Sheets, because the AI is selecting chart types, color schemes, and layouts, not just formulas.

Where Bricks is strong:

Generating complete functional spreadsheets from a description. "Create a monthly budget tracker with income and expense categories, running totals, and a chart showing spending by category" produces a working tracker rather than a blank template.

Dashboard generation. The visual output for summaries and reports is a significant step up from raw spreadsheet data.

Formula explanation and debugging. Bricks can explain what any complex formula does in plain language and suggest fixes for formula errors.

Where Bricks has limitations:

The learning curve for the AI interface: you need to learn how to describe what you want in ways the AI handles well. This takes practice.

For users with complex existing spreadsheets, Bricks' value is less clear. It's best for building new things from scratch rather than augmenting existing complex workbooks.

Integration: Bricks isn't Excel or Google Sheets. If your organization has existing workflows, templates, or integrations built on those platforms, Bricks doesn't fit in easily.

Pricing:

Free: limited AI credits per month
Pro: $10/month billed annually ($12/month billed monthly)
Teams: $20/user/month billed annually

Choosing between them: real workflow scenarios

You're a business analyst who lives in Excel: Excel Copilot if your organization will pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30/user/month). The depth of analysis features and the smooth integration with existing Excel workflows makes it worth the price for daily users. For occasional use, it's hard to justify.

You work in Google Workspace and need more than basic assistance: Gemini for Google Workspace add-on at $20/user/month. The AI features are strong enough for most business analysis tasks and everything stays in your existing workflow.

You need to process text data at scale in a spreadsheet (classify, extract, tag hundreds or thousands of cells): Numerous. The formula-based design makes batch AI processing accessible without coding. Start with the free tier to test your specific use case, then size up based on volume.

You need to build dashboards and reports quickly for non-technical stakeholders: Bricks or Copilot. Bricks is better for building new reports from scratch; Copilot is better if you're working with existing data in established spreadsheets.

You're an individual user who can't justify enterprise pricing: Google Sheets with free AI features for most tasks, Numerous Starter at $19/month if you need batch AI processing. The gap between free and paid tiers in Google Sheets is meaningful but the free tier is functional.

What AI still doesn't change about spreadsheets

AI helps you build the spreadsheet and write the formulas. It doesn't help you decide what analysis to do or whether the analysis is answering the right question. That judgment is still yours.

The garbage-in-garbage-out problem is also unchanged. If your source data has inconsistencies, duplicates, or missing values, AI-generated formulas and analysis will be wrong in the same ways manual analysis would be. Data quality work is still a prerequisite.

And for complex financial modeling, statistical analysis, or any analysis where being wrong has real consequences: review the AI's output carefully. The formulas Copilot generates are usually correct for the described task, but "usually" isn't "always" and the error patterns are sometimes non-obvious. Trust but verify on anything that matters.