A note from OpenAI says that you may no longer have to download files you have on Google Drive or OneDrive if you want to use ChatGPT to analyze your data. You will be able to add those files directly to the chatbot. The feature, rolling out to paying ChatGPT users over the next few weeks, will save people from the annoyance of having to first download a file and then upload it again on the chatbot.

Once they’ve got access to the feature, ChatGPT Plus, Enterprise, and Teams users will only need to give the chatbot access to their Google Drive or OneDrive account. OpenAI says in a blog post that the integration means ChatGPT can read through Excel, Word, PowerPoint files, and their Google equivalents “more quickly.” So far, the improved data analytics features are only available through GPT-4o, the faster and improved version of GPT-4 which powers the paid version of the chatbot. 

OpenAI also improved ChatGPT’s ability to understand datasets from instructions written in natural language. Users can ask the chatbot to run Python codes for analytics, merge or clean datasets, and create charts from information on files. 

ChatGPT had been able to make charts if asked, but now the chatbot lets people interact with the tables and charts it makes, expand the table’s view, and customize the data visualization — for example, by changing colors or asking additional questions on the cells. ChatGPT currently supports bar, line, pie, and scatter plot charts for interactive visualizations and will generate static versions for chart types it doesn’t yet support. 

OpenAI reiterates in the blog post that it will not train AI models from data that ChatGPT Enterprise and Teams users upload, and ChatGPT Plus subscribers can opt out of training.