Back to the Future: A workbook time machine for spread sheet creation benchmarks
Authors: Mansi Uniyal, Agamdeep Singh, Ananya Singha, Priyanshu Gupta, Mukul Singh, Gust Verbruggen, Vu Le, Sumit Gulwani
Abstract
We introduce the workbook time machine, a pipeline that automatically creates benchmarks evaluating the ability of language models to create derived objects in spreadsheets (formulas, charts, pivot tables, and conditional formatting). Applied to public workbook corpora, it produces wtmcorpus--a collection of (input workbook, output workbook, query) triples spanning four artifact types and varying complexity. From this corpus we curate wtmbench, a 150-task evaluation benchmark with queries at three levels of specificity. We evaluate existing spreadsheet manipulation agents and baselines on wtmbench across artifact types, step complexity, and instruction granularity. Our evaluations show that query specificity, agent orchestration, and interface API used to control spreadsheets play a big role in LLM performance on Excel tasks.
Spreadsheets are widely used for business analysis, financial modeling, reporting, and decision-making. However, most existing spreadsheet benchmarks evaluate isolated operations such as single-formula generation or local cell edits, and therefore fail to capture end-to-end workflows in realistic business settings. We introduce \textsc{SpreadsheetBench 2}, a workflow-level benchmark for spreadsheet agents that covers three task categories: generation, debugging, and visualization. The benchmark is constructed from authentic business data, including financial reports and corporate filings, and is annotated and validated by domain experts. The benchmark contains 321 tasks; each instance averages 11.8 worksheets and requires 593.5 cell modifications, reflecting large multi-sheet workbooks with cross-sheet dependencies. We evaluate eight frontier large language models under a unified multi-turn agent scaffold, and additionally include several LLM-based spreadsheet products as complementary baselines. Results show that current systems remain far from reliable on real-world workflows: the best model achieves 34.89% overall task accuracy, and debugging accuracy is as low as 12.00%. Trajectory analysis and a failure taxonomy further indicate that insufficient spreadsheet inspection and incorrect target-cell selection are the dominant bottlenecks. Together, these findings position \textsc{SpreadsheetBench 2} as a challenging testbed for advancing reliable spreadsheet automation. Project page: https://spreadsheetbench.github.io/
We consider the task of end-to-end spreadsheet generation, where language models produce spreadsheet artifacts to satisfy users' explicit and implicit constraints, specified in natural language. We introduce SpreadsheetArena, a platform for evaluating models' performance on the task via blind pairwise preference votes of LLM-generated spreadsheet workbooks. As with other complex, open-ended tasks, relevant evaluation criteria can vary greatly across use cases, often in ways that are difficult to formalize. Compared to general dialogue or text generation settings, spreadsheet generation presents unique challenges and opportunities: the task output structure is well-defined and multi-dimensional, and there are often complex interactivity and layout considerations. We observe that stylistic, structural, and functional features of preferred spreadsheets vary meaningfully across prompts. Expert evaluations of spreadsheets for finance prompts suggest that even highly ranked models do not reliably produce spreadsheets aligned with domain-specific best practices. We host a live arena and release a dataset of prompts, generated spreadsheets, and preference votes, which we hope will facilitate further study of tasks operating over spreadsheets as a challenging and interesting class of complex, open-ended tasks for LLMs.
LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.