Microsoft researchers have unveiled SpreadsheetLLM, a new AI model designed to understand and work with spreadsheets. SpreadsheetLLM combines large language models (LLMs) with structured spreadsheet data, allowing AI to reason over spreadsheet contents.

SpreadsheetLLM uses a novel encoding scheme that preserves spreadsheet structure and relationships, making it accessible to LLMs. Key features include Sheetcompressor for spreadsheet compression, structural anchor extraction to identify key rows and columns, inverted-index translation for efficient encoding, and data format-aware aggregation.