Finally, a way to pipe Raw Data into Excel without the manual mess

Published: 2026-02-08

If you're handling experimental data, you know the drill. You've got a folder full of .txt or .csv files, and getting them into Excel in a clean format usually involves a annoying mix of Power Query or endless Copy-Paste. It's 2026, we shouldn't be doing this anymore.

I just finished a workflow using Mica to automate this entire pipeline. Instead of clicking through "Import Data" menus, I just told the AI what I wanted in plain English. It actually navigated my local file system, grabbed the raw data, and did the math for me.

The Prompt I used:
"Import RawExperimentalData from Documents\workdata to Excel and compute the mean and standard deviation of the output at each temperature."

Video: 0 to Finished Report in Seconds

How it handled the complex stuff

What impressed me most wasn't just the file import—it was the formula logic. Calculating a mean based on specific temperature criteria usually requires some annoying absolute referencing. Mica didn't just dump static values; it wrote the actual formulas into the cells.

Check out this syntax it generated on the fly:
=AVERAGEIF(ExperimentalData!$B$2:$B$47, A2, ExperimentalData!$C$2:$C$47)

That's a pretty heavy lift for someone who isn't a "Formula Ninja," but the AI nailed the range locking (those $ signs are easy to mess up). The whole process felt incredibly snappy. Since everything stays on my local machine, I don't have to worry about my company's data leaking into a public LLM training set.

If you're tired of being the "Excel guy" who spends hours cleaning columns, you should probably just automate yourself out of that job. It saves a ton of time, and the results are way more consistent than doing it by hand.

Want to try this workflow on your own files?

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