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How to Create a Summary Report in Excel with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Creating summary reports in Excel no longer means you have to wrestle with nested formulas or confusing PivotTable settings. If you're tired of the manual drudgery, you can now use ChatGPT as a copilot to simplify the entire process. This article will show you exactly how to leverage ChatGPT to create formulas, structure summaries, and generate insightful reports in Excel in a fraction of the time.

What is a Summary Report? (And Why Use One?)

A summary report condenses a large dataset into a small, easy-to-digest format. Think of it as the highlight reel for your data. Instead of looking at thousands of rows of individual sales transactions, a summary report might show you total sales per month, top-performing product categories, or average order value by region.

The goal is to move from raw data to actionable information. These reports are essential for:

  • Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

  • Identifying trends, patterns, and outliers

  • Making informed business decisions

  • Presenting key results to teammates, managers, or clients

Traditionally, you'd build these in Excel using tools like PivotTables or formulas such as SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and AVERAGEIFS. These are powerful but can be intimidating if you haven't mastered the syntax. This is where ChatGPT can step in and help.

First Things First: Prepare Your Data

Before you can summarize anything, your data needs to be clean and organized. ChatGPT, or any analysis tool for that matter, works best with well-structured data. Think of it like cooking: you get better results if you prep your ingredients before you start.

Checklist for Clean Data:

  • Use Clear Headers: Give each column a simple, descriptive name (e.g., “Sale Date,” “Product Category,” “Revenue”). Avoid vague titles or merged cells in your header row.

  • Keep It Tabled: Your data should be in a simple tabular format. Each row should represent a single record (like one sale), and each column should represent a single attribute (like date, product, or sales amount).

  • Remove Blank Rows and Columns: Unnecessary blanks can interrupt formulas and confuse analysis tools.

  • Ensure Consistent Formatting: Make sure all dates in your “Date” column are formatted as dates, all numbers in your “Revenue” column are formatted as currency or numbers, and all text is consistent (e.g., “Electronics” vs. “electronics”).

A little bit of cleanup upfront saves a massive amount of troubleshooting later. Once your data is prepped, you're ready to bring in your AI assistant.

Using ChatGPT to Generate Excel Formulas

This is where ChatGPT truly shines as an Excel companion. Instead of googling a formula and trying to adapt it to your spreadsheet, you can simply ask ChatGPT to write it for you. This turns a frustrating five-minute search into a ten-second conversation.

Let's walk through an example. Imagine you have a dataset of sales transactions in an Excel sheet with this structure:

  • Column A: Order ID

  • Column B: Sale Date

  • Column C: Product Category

  • Column D: Sales Rep

  • Column E: Revenue

Step 1: Calculate Total Revenue for a Specific Category

Your goal is to find the total revenue from the “Apparel” category. Instead of trying to remember the SUMIF syntax, you can give ChatGPT a simple prompt.

Your Prompt:

"Write me an Excel formula to calculate the total revenue from the 'Apparel' category. My revenue data is in Column E, and my product categories are in Column C."

ChatGPT's Response:

Simply copy that formula, paste it into any empty cell in your workbook, and press Enter. It instantly calculates the total revenue for all apparel-related sales.

Step 2: Use Multiple Criteria with SUMIFS

What if you want to get more specific? For instance, let's find the total revenue for the “Electronics” category sold by the sales rep “John Smith.” This requires a SUMIFS formula, as we're using multiple conditions.

Your Prompt:

"Now, can you give me an Excel formula to sum the revenue (Column E) only for sales in the 'Electronics' category (Column C) made by 'John Smith' (Column D)?"

ChatGPT's Response:

This same logic applies to other powerful summarizing formulas. You can ask for COUNTIFS to count the number of sales that meet certain criteria (e.g., count how many sales John Smith made) or AVERAGEIFS to find the average revenue for specific segments.

Structuring Your Summary Report Table

Formulas are just one piece of the puzzle. A great summary report needs a clear structure. ChatGPT can help you build the scaffolding for your report before you even start plugging in formulas.

Say you want to create a small table that summarizes the total revenue for each product category. First, you need a unique list of all the categories in your dataset.

Creating a Unique List of Categories

Copy a sample of your “Product Category” column (a few dozen rows is fine if your dataset is huge) and paste it into ChatGPT.

Your Prompt:

"I have a list of product categories from an Excel sheet. Can you provide me with a unique, alphabetized list of these categories?

Here is the data:ApparelElectronicsHome GoodsApparelToysHome GoodsElectronicsApparelBooksToys..."

ChatGPT's Response:

Now, you can copy this clean list and paste it into a new area of your Excel sheet (e.g., starting in cell G2). To the right of this list (e.g., in cell H2), you are now ready to add your summary formulas. Instead of hard-coding the category name like "Apparel" into your SUMIF, you can reference the cell containing the category name. In cell H2, you would enter:

=SUMIF(C:C, G2, E:E)

Now, you can drag this formula down, and it will automatically calculate the total revenue for each category in your beautiful new summary table.

Advanced Techniques: PivotTable Instructions and VBA Scripts

If you're ready to move beyond basic formulas, ChatGPT can guide you through more advanced reporting features in Excel.

Generating PivotTable Steps

A PivotTable is Excel’s most powerful built-in summarization tool. While ChatGPT can't click the buttons for you, it can give you a perfect step-by-step PivotTable recipe to follow.

Your Prompt:

"I want to create a summary report using a PivotTable in Excel. Briefly, give me the steps to summarize total revenue by Sales Rep (in rows) and by Product Category (in columns) for all sales. My data is in a table on Sheet1."

ChatGPT will then outline the exact process:

  1. Select any cell within your data range.

  2. Go to the Insert tab on the Ribbon and click PivotTable.

  3. Confirm the data range in the pop-up window and click OK.

  4. In the PivotTable Fields pane on the right:

    • Drag the “Sales Rep” field to the Rows area.

    • Drag the “Product Category” field to the Columns area.

    • Drag the “Revenue” field to the Values area.

It acts like an expert tutor, walking you through a process that might otherwise require trial and error.

Writing Simple VBA Automation Scripts

For repetitive tasks, you can even ask ChatGPT to write a basic VBA macro.Note:Be cautious when running code from any source. It's a good idea to understand what the script does before you run it, especially on important workbooks.

Something as simple as this can be a huge time-saver:

Your Prompt:

"Write me a simple Excel VBA macro that finds all the cells in column A with the word 'Urgent' and colors the entire row yellow."

Copying and pasting the generated VBA code into Excel's Visual Basic Editor automates a task that would have been tedious to do manually, helping you prepare reports that are both summarized and visually useful.

Final Thoughts

Using ChatGPT as a partner for Excel reporting fundamentally changes the workflow. It transforms you from a manual data wrangler into a manager who simply directs the AI to do the heavy lifting of writing formulas, structuring tables, or providing instructions. This frees you up to focus on analyzing the results and finding genuine insights.

While this method is powerful, eventually the friction of copying and pasting between tools can become its own bottleneck. That's why we built Graphed . We wanted to eliminate the manual steps of cleaning data, exporting CSVs, writing formulas, and building charts yourself. Instead of using one AI to create formulas for another application, you can simply connect your data sources directly and ask questions in plain English to instantly generate live, interactive dashboards and summary reports. It's a faster and more direct path from data to decision.