Availability
SparkBench is in development. It is not listed in Microsoft's add-in store, has no download, no account to create and no price. Dates have not been set and are not promised here.
Development so far has been on Excel for Windows and Excel on the web with synthetic workbooks; the AI side has been exercised with a stand-in rather than a live service. Excel for Mac is a target without evidence yet. The status page lists what has been shown.
What you can do today
- Read how it works and decide whether the local-execution idea fits how your organisation treats its data.
- Try the fictional school demonstration. It runs in your browser with invented data and shows the shape of an investigation: describe, receive a job, run it here, change an assumption, compare, keep.
- Read the data and privacy handling page and the privacy policy draft, and tell us what questions they leave open.
- If you administer Microsoft 365 for an organisation, read the administrator notes; they list the decisions that affect you and are still pending.
What to expect when it is available
These are design intentions, not a published onboarding flow. The actual steps will be documented here when they exist and have been tested.
- Getting the add-in
Excel add-ins are normally made available by an organisation's administrator or through Microsoft's add-in store. Which routes SparkBench will use is pending. No sideloading instructions are published, because development builds are not a customer product.
- Connecting to an AI
The job-writing step needs a remote AI. Whether that runs under your organisation's own cloud account or under the publisher's, and how it is paid for, is pending. Either way, the material sent is limited to the approved task text, data structure and shareable development material.
- First task
Open a workbook with a table. Describe what you want. Review what will be sent, send it, read the job, run it, read the results beside your data. Nothing is written into your workbook until you confirm.
- Requirements
Supported Excel versions and any tenant-level permissions are pending and will be stated precisely rather than approximately.
Questions
The support page explains how to reach the people building SparkBench and how to ask a question without sending any of your workbook along with it.