The full guide to Tracelight AI in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and on the Web — from your first prompt to model review, Trace, exports, skills, and shortcuts.
The Tracelight Platform is your central AI workspace for orchestrating work end-to-end, and using the full power of all your tools (including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word).
B. Tracelight Excel add-in
You can find Tracelight in Excel by clicking the “Add-ins” button in the top right.
C. PowerPoint & Word add-ins
Tracelight is also in PowerPoint and Word; you can access it in the same way as in Excel.
Part 1
Chat: Build Models in Minutes
A. Prompting
Build and summarise models by using natural language to prompt Tracelight.
Prompt Tracelight as if you were talking to the analyst who built the sheet.
The Previous agents tab below the chat box allows you to access older agent runs.
You can also prompt a web search with Tracelight for online research.
B. Modes
Agent: build automatically according to instructions — use for speed and convenience.
Plan: optimise your prompts so Tracelight follows your intent as closely as possible.
C. Import Documents
Click and drag into the chat to import PowerPoint, Word, Excel, PDF, image files, CSVs, and more. The file appears in a labelled panel in the chat as shown below for the 10K.
Part 2
Model Review
A. Changeset
All edits are recorded. You stay in control, view what has changed, and can undo changes.
Once Tracelight has built your analysis, click the “Changes” button at the bottom of the chat to see each component of Tracelight’s changes.
B. Model Review
Model review is available in both the Tracelight Platform and Excel add-in.
To check for errors in your sheet, click on the “Model Review” tab, and then click the “Run model review” button [see below left]. Tracelight highlights formulas that could be mistakes or are not following best practices.
Click on a model review run to examine each error by severity; Tracelight shows a summary of each error [see below right].
To navigate to a relevant cell, just click the cells highlighted in the summary.
Click the “Fix all” button to correct the errors.
Use Color to color-code cells by formula structure. For Compare, see “Compare Workbooks” below.
View “Live checks” to instantly see and filter potential errors on your current sheet.
Part 3
Trace: Understand your Model
A. Overview
You can navigate to the Trace tab at the top of the Tracelight panel.
Trace helps you understand how different formulas and cells are linked to each other.
B. How to Use Trace
In the top view is the navigation pane, which clockwise from top left shows; model section, column, value, and row for the relevant cell.
Toggle between views of the formulas by changing precedents; range (cells referenced in the formulas), values (values in the cell), and labels (what the cells mean).
Hit Enter on a cell reference to see the precedent of that cell.
Navigate through the precedent tree with shortcuts as shown below.
At the bottom, you can also see an explanation of the formula.
Part 4
Charts, Tables, Export & Apps
A. Charts and Tables
You can prompt Tracelight to build a wide variety of charts and tables, including with Python and HTML.
B. Export
To export into another format — like PowerPoint, Word, CSV, or PDF, just prompt Tracelight in the chat.
C. Spreadsheet Apps
Build shareable, interactive spreadsheet app deliverables, which calculate live directly from the model as you flex assumptions (without Excel open), ranging from dashboards to client-ready reports. Click on any number in the app to see it cited to its source (see right below).
Part 5
Skills & Instructions
A. Skills: Automate Your Repetitive Tasks
By typing “/” in the chat, you can open up the Skills dropdown. Here, you can use or build skills to automate your repetitive tasks (to build, use create-skill).
To use the skill, type “/” and select it from the menu.
B. Instructions and Style Guides
Tracelight makes formatting specific to your required style automatic; click the “+” in the bottom left of the chat to open the instructions tab, where you can add custom instructions or create a style guide to automate formatting according to your preferred style.
Part 6
Compare Workbooks
A. Compare Workbooks
To compare two versions of the same workbook, click the Tracelight icon above the chat to navigate to Compare Workbooks in the Platform (app.tracelight.ai/compare), or use it directly from the Platform, where you can drop in two versions of the same model to view the differences. You can also access Compare Workbooks from the Model review tab in the add-in.
You can then see every change made in the spreadsheet, as well as an AI summary of their impact on your model.
Toggle Computed Changes to see how the input changes impact downstream variables.
Part 7
PDF Citations & Projects
A. PDF Citations
Tracelight reads PDFs and writes the data into your spreadsheets, with every cell cited to source, and a source viewer in the right-hand panel highlighting exactly where in the PDF each number came from.
B. Projects
Projects organise all your files, chats, and artefacts about a financial model in one place, so you can work faster with all your project context.
You can find projects on the right above the Tracelight chat box. Click the button on the right of each project to open them in Tracelight web, where you can see all the files in your project.
Part 8
PowerPoint
A. Export Excel Outputs into PowerPoints
Prompt Tracelight to build any kind of PowerPoint deck using an Excel or other context like PDFs.
If you give Tracelight a reference to work from, such as a style guide / deck, then it will build the deck according to the reference.
B. Tracelight PowerPoint Add-In
Run a consistency check between the PPT and underlying model in the Platform, update numbers in your deck, or use PowerPoint citations to see where each number comes from in the underlying Excel model and ensure they are correct.
Use Tracelight as a general-purpose AI tool in PPT; ask for summaries, advice on copy or format, search in a PPT for certain information, and much more.
