I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for the best Excel formula—they all disagreed

I used to spend far too much time building and debugging complex Excel formulas. Now, I can describe a problem to AI and get a working answer in seconds. But when I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for the "best" Excel formula, they all gave me different answers.

Three assistants solved the same problem differently

One prompt, three different formulas

For this test, I gave ChatGPT , Claude , and Gemini exactly the same prompt. I used standalone AI assistants rather than Microsoft Copilot so each model worked from identical instructions and context.

Here's what I said:

I have an Excel table named T_Sales. It contains the columns Product, Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, and a blank column called First Month Over 10000. I need a formula for the First Month Over 10000 column that returns the first month where that row's sales exceed 10,000. If no month exceeds 10,000, return "None". I'm using Microsoft 365 Excel. Please provide the best formula and briefly explain why you chose that approach.

This wasn't intended as a scientific benchmark—one prompt cannot represent every possible AI response. Instead, my aim was to see how different AI assistants approached the same Excel problem.

Even with the same prompt, the same goal, and a straightforward task, each AI chose a different approach.

ChatGPT suggested:

=LET(sales, T_Sales[@[Jan]:[Jun]], months, T_Sales[[#Headers],[Jan]:[Jun]], match_pos, XMATCH(TRUE, sales>10000), IFERROR(INDEX(months, match_pos), "None"))

Claude suggested:

=LET(sales_data, T_Sales[@[Jan]:[Jun]], month_names, {"Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun"}, match_idx, XMATCH(TRUE, sales_data>10000), IF(ISNA(match_idx), "None", INDEX(month_names, match_idx)))

Gemini provided two options:

=XLOOKUP(TRUE, T_Sales[@[Jan]:[Jun10000, {"Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun"}, "None", 1)