Snowflake CoCo: Excel versus Sheets refresh and review

Snowflake’s November 3 preview release brings CoCo to Excel and Google Sheets. Installation, refresh behavior and reversibility need separate checks.

Both previews stage changes for acceptance and attach source citations. Queries use your Snowflake role, including masking and row‑access policies. That enables review; it does not certify a result’s correctness.

During the Excel preview, sideloading is per user and computer. Sign‑in also needs an administrator‑supplied OAuth client ID and a Snowflake account with Cortex and CoCo enabled.

Refresh‑on‑open consent belongs to one user, account and computer; a shared file transfers the request, not consent. With the setting on, accepting a refresh or adding a table extends your agreed queries. Saved queries outside that agreement need manual refresh and acceptance before running on open, including queries somebody else adds or edits. Your own Save As copy can reuse consent for unchanged queries.

Undo cannot restore pre‑refresh table data; reverting associated PivotTables can leave them out of step. Pane refresh avoids CoCo tokens but still uses warehouse compute; asking in chat consumes tokens.

The Sheets preview uses Apps Script copied into each spreadsheet. Google Workspace Marketplace delivery and organization‑wide installation are future steps, not today’s setup. An existing Excel OAuth integration and client ID can also serve Sheets. It runs in a computer browser, not the Android or iOS apps. Sheets lacks CORTEX cell functions and refresh‑on‑open: someone must start the refresh. Large query results can take several undo steps to reverse.

Pane Refresh data and /refresh rerun saved SQL without a model request, so they consume no CoCo tokens. Warehouse compute remains billable. Asking for refresh in chat consumes CoCo tokens; the add‑on is token‑billed without a separate per‑seat license. These are Snowflake’s documented behaviors, not an OpenTools workbook test.

Archive: a Snowflake booth, June 14, 2023; not a CoCo preview demonstration. Photo: Raysonho / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0. Cropped and downscaled; no endorsement.