Ability to mark tables in Excel as separate questions and answers

AllianceBernstein frequently receives Excel DDQs with multiple responses needed in tables. Currently the only work around is to mark the answer as table but Alliance says this is cumbersome, requires them to answer each cell individually, and makes it difficult to use the recommendation engine copy/apply feature.

They would like to be able to bring in these tables as separate questions and responses.

(example: this would need to come marked as "mark table as answer")

I'm attaching a sample Excel AllianceBernstein shared.

Sample RFP for Responsive_Excel.xlsx

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Will not implement

Status: Will not implement

Comments

Khalees V

@Pablo Ojeda Just curious to know if each row is imported as separate questions, how do they bring in answers from recommendation pane? Because, the question will be same and how would recommendation pane or auto-respond will retrieve answers for each same question.

Pablo Ojeda

@Khalees V I spoke with AllianceBernstein and instead of uploading these as separate questions they would like to mark table as answer but be able to apply a response that would fill in each cell. So in other words find the answer, click apply, and it would populate Name, Position, Experience, etc. at once. They get several of these and having to answer one cell at a time is very time consuming for them.

Khalees V

@Pablo Ojeda Can we recommend AI Draft? AI Draft will now support responding to tables that are straightforward. Here is the document i drafted to explain the feature. Please note this is still under Alpha and not all table scenarios are addressed. This is just the start of POC and hence there will be scenarios where AI Draft cannot bring in answers into table as expected.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XgP1RmHBh4lZUJKIi6tMAe09hJqY89dYbhgHFn7vm-8/edit?usp=sharing

Pablo Ojeda

@Khalees V I added this note to the spreadsheet concerning this enhancement.

I spoke to Alliance and AI Draft will not work. AI Draft works for filling in a table response if the table is in their library. The issue is once the tables are in their content library they need an easy way to update them. Since it is financial data it changes monthly and sometimes weekly. They would need to update each table one cell or column at a time which is not scalable.

Khalees V

@Pablo If i understand the problem correctly, they have tables with financial data in the Content Library as Q&A pairs. Now they need to update the data in the table from a document, so the existing data will be replaced in the Content Library. Please correct me if my understanding is correct?

Pablo Ojeda

@Khalees V yes, you are correct. The current Q&A pairs in the library would need to be updated.

Khalees V

@Pablo Ojeda As of today, this is not in our 2025 roadmap.

Khalees V

@Pablo Ojeda Based on recent Slack conversation - Bringing in each row as separate Q&A is not in our roadmap. The workaround to fill out the table is to use AI Draft. The attached recording will help you understand how we can use AI Draft to answer to the table based questions even if the answer in the Content Library is paragraph based. We need to educate our Customer on this. Converting a large table into multiple question is not the best/recommended solution for this problem

AllianceBernstein_Table as answer type.mp4

FYI: @Bagavathy Nagarajan

Pablo Ojeda

@Khalees V Thank you for the video. Unfortunately, Alliance does not have AI and they said many times they are unable to map Excel documents as they have merged cells.