OpenAI's ChatGPT upgrade: Google Drive integration, no more file downloading, more powerful analytics, and more

OpenAI announced a significant upgrade to ChatGPT, empowering users to analyse data directly from Google Drive and OneDrive without the need for downloading and uploading. This new feature, rolling out to paying ChatGPT users over the next few weeks, aims to streamline data analysis and save users time and hassle.

"ChatGPT is now more connected to your data than ever before," said OpenAI in a blog post. "With the integration of Google Drive and OneDrive, you can directly access and analyse your files – from Excel spreadsheets to PowerPoint presentations – within the chatbot."

This direct access, available to ChatGPT Plus, Enterprise, and Teams users, allows ChatGPT to analyse files "more quickly," according to OpenAI. The enhanced data analytics features, however, are currently only available through GPT-4o, the upgraded version of GPT-4 powering the paid tiers of ChatGPT.

Beyond direct file access, OpenAI has improved ChatGPT's ability to understand and manipulate data. Users can now issue natural language commands to perform a range of data-related tasks, including:

- Running Python code for analytics

- Merging and cleaning datasets

- Creating charts from file information

ChatGPT's charting abilities have also taken a leap forward. Users can now interact with the generated tables and charts, expand their views, and customise the visualisations – changing colours, asking questions about specific cells, and more. The chatbot currently supports interactive bar, line, pie, and scatter plot charts, generating static versions for unsupported chart types.

OpenAI also underlined that user data is protected. ChatGPT Enterprise and Teams users will not have their data used for training AI models, while ChatGPT Plus subscribers can opt out of this feature.