For a long time we have been talking about artificial intelligence in its several versions: machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, expert systems… We can safely say that it is the most fruitful technological sector in recent years, as it has been proven, due to the huge progress , which we have noted in this regard, and with the prospect that this trend will continue in the future, both in the short and medium term.

Artificial intelligence is already very present in our lives, whether with highly visible technological solutions, with examples such as DLSS, NVIDIA’s superscaling system that uses deep learning, or artificial intelligence trends such as DALL-E 2. and ChatGPT, or solutions based on them, but not so obvious, such as voice assistants, personalized suggestion systems and a number of similar services and functions.

Every week we discover new uses for artificial intelligence and there are many instances where we get a quick glimpse of the practical uses we can put it to. And in that sense, I recently discovered one in particular that caught my eye the most. This is Simple ML for Sheets, an add-on for the Google Sheets feature that you can install from this link, which uses machine learning will allow us to make some very interesting revisions to our documents.

The plugin was designed by the TensorFlow Decision Forests team (decision forests are a type of machine learning model for supervised learning). It’s currently in beta, but it’s already open to all users who want it, and it’s completely free, so it’s worth checking out how it works, if only out of curiosity… though you’ll surely find something useful eventually use for this, especially if you usually work with data.

After installation, the plugin offers us the option to download a test document, which, combined with its tutorial, will allow you to explore its operation, both in terms of analyzing data with pre-installed models and generating a new model based on your own data. so that I can then analyze it.

The big key, though, is that this is an incredibly easy-to-use plugin. No prior knowledge of machine learning is required to create a model based on your own data in five minutes and use it to infer missing data, detect anomalies (these are two examples described in the tutorial) or, once you get the hang of it. its potential so that it can be used for other purposes.

I’m preparing some datasets to explain how to use it with them soon, but for now my recommendation, especially if you’re interested in machine learning in particular, AI in general, and/or you usually work with large amounts of data. The result, as you can see, is spectacular.