With AI integration, Excel becomes a powerful tool for analyzing, processing and generating data. But why OpenRouter? It brings together hundreds of language models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and many others, behind one API and one key, and dozens of them are free.
!SEMTools makes connecting OpenRouter to Excel as simple as possible: no scripts to write or edit, no API details to figure out. Here is how to connect it and start processing data.
Install the !SEMTools add-in
If your Excel doesn’t have the !SEMTools Pro tab yet, download and install the add-in first. Follow the installation guide carefully and come back here when you’re done.
List of OpenRouter models
The service offers a huge choice of models, paid and free. To see the full list and choose a model, run the corresponding procedure from the add-in menu:
The procedure gets the list online through the service API, so it’s always up to date: the list keeps growing. Models with “:free” in the name cost nothing, but have rate limits.
How to get and save the API key
Sign up on the official OpenRouter website, open the Keys section and create a new key.
To save the key in the add-in, run the separate procedure from the menu, paste the key into the box and click OK. The key is saved and used automatically every time you process data.
Bulk processing of prompts
The setup is done, now you can process data! Prepare the list of prompts, select it and run the “Process list of prompts” procedure.
To turn, for example, customer review texts into prompts, add a common prefix with the Insert text at the beginning procedure from the Change cells menu, such as “Rate the sentiment of this review from 1 to 5: ”, and then process the list:
In the trial version of !SEMTools, about 2/3 of the prompts are processed. The other 1/3 of the cells are replaced with the note “Available in the full version”, and no API request is made for them.
As you can see, the API sometimes returns errors, especially for free models under load. The errors are written right into the cells, so you can filter them and process those rows again. Don’t confuse API errors with the full-version limitation: OpenRouter is not always stable, and that has nothing to do with your version of !SEMTools.
Compare hundreds of AI models and process thousands of prompts right from an Excel sheet with one OpenRouter key.
!SEMTools solves this and hundreds of other tasks in a couple of clicks!
Summary
I hope you found what you were looking for on this page and were able to connect OpenRouter to Excel. One key gives you access to hundreds of models, including free ones, which makes it perfect for quickly comparing models on your own data. Start small: process a column of 20 prompts and see how it changes your work. More ideas are in the article on working with AI in Excel.