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An alternative to Copilot in Excel, for data you would rather not send anywhere

Copilot in Excel is a cloud service bought as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription: your prompt and the relevant parts of your workbook are processed on Microsoft's servers. TableDI is a desktop spreadsheet workspace that runs entirely on your machine, and its AI uses an API key you supply. Same category of help, different trust model — and a different bill.

The honest summary is that these are different shapes of tool, not better and worse versions of one tool. The table is the short answer; the sections under it are where the trade-offs live.

	Copilot in Excel	TableDI
Where the AI runs	Microsoft's cloud	Your provider, called directly from your machine
Who sees the data you send	Microsoft, under their enterprise terms	Only the AI provider whose key you entered. TableDI never sees the key or the data
What it costs	A Microsoft 365 subscription with a Copilot license	Your own API usage, billed by your provider, plus the paid tier
Which model	Whatever Microsoft ships	Whichever your key is for
Works with no network	No — it is a cloud service	The app does. AI calls need the network, like any AI
Writes formulas	Yes, in Excel's own language, which is the point	Yes, in TableDI's 82-function language
Builds a whole dashboard from a sentence	Charts and analysis, in the workbook	Yes — one prompt produces the dashboard
Reads a photograph of a table	Not in this flow	Yes — invoices, receipts and printed tables, read by the AI provider whose key you supplied
AI inside a formula	No	`ai.generate`, `web.crawl`, `google.search` as cell functions
Fits the workbook you already have	Yes — it is Excel	You import the file first

The trust question, stated precisely

Copilot is a cloud service. Asking it about a workbook means the prompt and the relevant content go to Microsoft's servers to be processed. Microsoft publishes enterprise data-protection commitments covering that, and for a great many organizations those commitments are exactly what makes it usable — this is not a scandal, it is how the product works. Microsoft has also tied Copilot in Excel to workbooks stored in OneDrive or SharePoint; check their current documentation before planning around it, because that requirement has moved more than once.

TableDI's model is different in kind rather than in degree: you bring your own API key, and the request goes from your machine straight to the provider that key belongs to. There is no TableDI server in the path. We do not see the key, the prompt or the data — not as a promise, but because there is no component of ours that the request passes through. How to set up a key.

Worth being exact about what that does and does not buy you: the data you choose to send still goes to an AI provider, and their terms apply. "Local AI" would mean a model running on your laptop, and that is not what this is. What is local is your workspace: the tables live on your disk, and only what you point the AI at travels.

What Copilot does better

It is already in the workbook. No import, no migration, no rebuilding formulas — it works on the file your colleague just sent you.
It speaks Excel. A formula it writes is an Excel formula, which survives being emailed to somebody who has never heard of any of this.
It knows Excel's whole surface — pivot tables, conditional formatting, the function library — and can explain the workbook back to you.
Your IT department has probably already approved it. That is not nothing.

What TableDI's AI does that Copilot's does not

A dashboard from one sentence. Describe the report you want and the charts, layout and underlying summary tables are built for you, reading the live data.
A photograph of a table becomes rows. An invoice, a receipt, a printed report — it is read into a table you can calculate on. Be precise about where it goes: the image is sent to the AI provider whose key you entered, never to us. What that means in practice.
AI as a cell function. ai.generate in a formula classifies every row of a column; web.crawl and google.search pull the outside world into cells. This is a different idea from a chat box beside a grid, and it is the part regular users tend to keep.
Your choice of model. Whatever your key is for, changeable whenever you like.
No subscription to the AI vendor. You pay your provider for what you use.

When to choose each

Use Copilot

Your organization already pays for Microsoft 365 and has approved it.
The work happens in workbooks other people send you and send back.
You need help with Excel itself — its formulas, its pivots, its quirks.
Microsoft's enterprise terms are what your compliance team wants to see.

Use TableDI

The data should not go to a general-purpose cloud assistant.
You already have an API key and would rather pay for usage than another seat.
The job is repeated data work, not editing one workbook.
You want OCR, AI-in-a-formula, or a dashboard generated from a sentence.
You are not inside the Microsoft 365 subscription in the first place.

Questions people ask

Is there a free alternative to Copilot in Excel?

TableDI's AI features are on the paid tier, but the AI itself is billed by your own provider rather than by us, which usually costs less than an added subscription seat for light use. The free tier includes everything except the AI plugins, automations, unlimited exports and extra dashboards — enough to see whether the workspace suits you. The split.

Does TableDI send my spreadsheet to an AI company?

Only the part you point it at, and only to the provider whose API key you entered. The request goes from your machine to them; TableDI has no server in the path and never sees the key or the data. If you never enter a key, no AI request is ever made.

Does the AI run locally, without any network?

No, and we will not claim otherwise. AI requests need the network and reach your chosen provider. What runs locally is everything else: the tables, the formulas, the pivots, the dashboards and the files.

Which AI providers can I use?

You supply an API key for a provider TableDI supports and it is used for every AI feature — formula generation, cleanup suggestions, chat over a table and the ai.generate function. Setting up the key walks through it.

Can Copilot and TableDI be used together?

Yes, and it is a sensible split: Copilot for the workbook that has to stay in Excel, TableDI for the recurring pipeline and the data you would rather keep on your own disk.

Do this on your own machine instead

TableDI is a desktop spreadsheet workspace that runs entirely on your machine. Import the file, fix it, chart it — nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to create.

Download TableDI free See what free includes

Free forever, not a trial — no account, no card. macOS and Windows. What the paid tier adds.

Last reviewed 2026-09-01 by the TableDI team. Something wrong on this page? Tell us — it is one inbox, read by the people who build TableDI.