3.2 – Analyzing Data Documents Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson focuses on using ChatGPT to analyze data documents such as Excel or CSV files. The ability to quickly make sense of spreadsheets, tables, or sales reports is useful for anyone handling data—whether you’re reviewing business metrics, tracking sales, or looking at stock price histories. Here, you’ll see how simple prompts can help ChatGPT deliver instant summaries, answer questions about the document, and even create clear visuals like charts or graphs. These skills not only save time, but also help you pull useful insights from files that might otherwise take hours to parse manually.

Knowing how to ask ChatGPT the right follow-up questions is key. You can find out what your data is about, which trends stand out, and even which columns or customers perform best. For datasets you haven’t seen before—or if they’re unclear or messy—ChatGPT also suggests ways to clean up and organize the information. These approaches fit seamlessly with earlier lessons, building your confidence in handling different types of documents with smart, targeted prompts.

Who This Is For

Working with data is part of many roles, not just data analysts. You’ll benefit from this lesson if you:

• Need to review spreadsheets, reports, or sales data
• Want to quickly understand unfamiliar data documents
• Build presentations using charts and summaries from raw data
• Regularly gather and compare data sets from different sources
• Handle routine analysis even without a technical background
• Look for ways to improve and clean messy data files quickly

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Analyzing data documents with ChatGPT is ideal during the “review” or “analysis” stage of almost any data-driven task. For instance:

• After downloading a report or receiving a CSV from a colleague, you can upload it and ask ChatGPT for a summary, main trends, or performance highlights.
• If you’re preparing slides, you can generate charts from your documents in seconds—saving time on manual graph creation.

This lesson’s approach helps with day-to-day reporting, stakeholder updates, and record-keeping, allowing you to focus on interpreting results instead of just compiling them.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Traditional data review relies on manually skimming spreadsheets, sorting columns, and trying to spot trends—steps that are time-consuming and prone to error. With ChatGPT’s document upload and analysis features, you can skip right to asking targeted questions or requesting instant data visualizations. If you have multiple files, ChatGPT can process up to 10 at once, making comparison and batch analysis much easier than before.

For example, in sales operations, quickly learning the top regions or categories can inform faster decisions. In education, reviewing survey results becomes more efficient. You can also clean or reorganize data without using other specialized tools. These capabilities increase productivity and boost the quality of your insights, even if you’re not a spreadsheet expert.

Practice Exercise

Choose a spreadsheet or CSV file you use regularly—or download a publicly available dataset (like monthly sales or product orders). Then:

1. Upload your data file into a new ChatGPT chat session.
2. Prompt ChatGPT with: “Give me a summary of this data.”
3. Ask a follow-up: “What trends do you notice in this data?” or “Can you visualize the top categories?”

Compare the AI’s summary to your own observations. Did ChatGPT spot trends or patterns you missed? Reflect on how easy it was to request charts or analyses without manual spreadsheet editing.

Course Context Recap

This lesson builds on earlier prompting basics by showing how to analyze structured documents using ChatGPT’s data-handling tools. Previously, you learned how to upload and discuss various document types. Next, you’ll explore how to make ChatGPT search the web for up-to-date information. Keep going with the course to make your prompting skills even more versatile and effective. Each lesson builds towards making ChatGPT a practical assistant for a wider range of tasks.