Many newcomers in the Techtonique API these days (10x more subscribers in one month). Hope you are enjoying it.

The occasion for me to write (again) a short post about how to use the Techtonique API in Excel, without writing any code. A lot of people are indeed familiar with Excel, but not everyone is comfortable writing Python or R code (or else).

Under the hood, the xlwings lite Excel add-in (that you can install from the link) exposes Techtonique API’s forecasting, regression, classification, reserving, and survival analysis functions as native worksheet functions – type a formula, select a data range, get results. That’s it.

Setup

Step 1 — Get a token from Techtonique API

Go to https://www.techtonique.net/token, sign up or log in, and copy your token. Valid for one hour. Then you can renew it as many times as you want.

Step 2 — Store the token in Excel

In xlwings lite, open the dropdown menu → Environment variables (see a detailed example file at https://github.com/Techtonique/techtonique-apis/blob/main/examples/excel_formulas.xlsx), and add:

Name Value
TECHTONIQUE_TOKEN (paste your token here)

Step 3 — Restart

Click Restart in the dropdown menu. The token is not active until after a restart. You only need to do this once, for one hour.

Using the functions

In any cell, type =TECHTO_ — Excel autocomplete lists everything available. The main functions are:

Function Task
=TECHTO_FORECAST(...) Probabilistic time series forecasting
=TECHTO_MLREGRESSION(...) Regression with prediction intervals
=TECHTO_MLCLASSIFICATION(...) Classification
=TECHTO_MLRESERVING(...) Claims reserving (loss triangles)
=TECHTO_SURVIVAL(...) Survival analysis

Each function takes a data range as its first argument — just select your data in the sheet — followed by optional parameters such as the model, forecast horizon, or number of hidden features. Results are returned as a table directly in the spreadsheet.

If something goes wrong, the error message from the API is displayed in the cell, which makes debugging straightforward without leaving Excel.

Help

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