Excel

Excel — real work, not an imagined feature: named in real job descriptions. Below are four ready AI prompts for it, one per height of help: do it, make it easier to accept, decide when you are stuck, and change the pattern for good.

4prompt heights

The four heights

The same task, four distances: today's deadline, the next reviewer, the stuck moment, the pattern.

Execute — do the immediate task

+
I have a spreadsheet with monthly revenue, costs and headcount through June and a renewal pricing…
I have a spreadsheet with monthly revenue, costs and headcount through June and a renewal pricing sheet attached. Send the updated revenue worksheet to Priya in procurement and to Miguel, the finance director, for e-signature, in that order, with a firm Friday deadline — but first check formulas, confirm totals match the summary tab and that the renewal column is populated for all accounts.

Improve — make it easier to accept

+
Before I send this workbook to the client's procurement team, make approval obvious: surface the…
Before I send this workbook to the client's procurement team, make approval obvious: surface the net savings number at the top, pull pricing lines into a single view, highlight any negative-margin rows and flag rows missing contract end dates that will make a reviewer hesitate.

Decide — diagnose the stuck moment

+
I corrected a copy-paste in the cost column and the summary total dropped by 12,000. Priya expects…

I updated formulas and now the totals shifted.

I corrected a copy-paste in the cost column and the summary total dropped by 12,000. Priya expects accurate monthly run-rate before Friday and Miguel will lock numbers. I don't know whether the drop is a real correction, a missing sheet, or an accidental range change. What's the most likely cause and the fastest reliable check so I can tell them the truth?

Become — change the pattern

+
Every quarter I spend a day chasing phantom discrepancies: formulas broken by pasting, hidden…

repeatedly fixing broken formulas before deadlines

Every quarter I spend a day chasing phantom discrepancies: formulas broken by pasting, hidden sheets with old assumptions, and version drift between analysts. I lose credibility and late approvals. What habit should I change so summaries are stable and I stop firefighting an hour before sign-off?
Software tasks in the LLOS Work Atlas come from evidence, never a feature list: careers attested to do the work, real job descriptions, and the questions people actually ask (with their view counts). Facets — feature, workflow, troubleshoot, administer, deploy, scale — are open metadata: the work decides, not a taxonomy.
Copyright © LLOS.ai · 2026 — original pedagogy, voice, and design — all rights reserved.

The rest of the map

Same library, five ways in.