Anthropic's Claude is learning Excel so you don't have to

Good luck to the 1,000 enterprise guinea pigs on the initial preview

Anthropic has opened a waitlist for Claude for Excel, promising spreadsheet devotees that its LLM will be able to understand their entire workbook.

Forty years since its launch, Excel is the productivity app that keeps the world ticking over, or the office cockroach that just won't die, depending on your point of view.

According to research by Acuity Training, two-thirds of all office workers use Excel at least once an hour, while over a third of total office worker time is spent on Excel.

Many of the "models" that financial whizzes rely on – and blithely refer to during earnings calls or presentations – are really nothing more than sophisticated spreadsheets.

So what better way for Anthropic to embed AI into corporate workflows than to take them over cell-by-cell?

Though that won't happen overnight. Anthropic's initial preview will be limited to a waitlist of 1,000 Max, Team, and Enterprise customers. This will be gradually expanded as "we build confidence through this limited preview."

In a statement, Anthropic said that Claude for Excel will allow users to "work directly with Claude in a sidebar in Microsoft Excel, where Claude can read, analyze, modify, and create new Excel workbooks."

It promised that "Claude listens carefully, follows instructions precisely, and thinks through complex problems."

More practically, it said Excel users will be able to ask the LLM about specific formulas or worksheets, with "cell-level citations so you can verify the logic."

Users will be able to "debug and fix errors" and create draft models from scratch or "populate existing templates with fresh data while maintaining all formulas and structure."

The preview version won't have "advanced Excel capabilities" such as pivot tables and data validation, or macros and VBA. But Anthropic said "we're working on those features."

Meanwhile, the model maker announced a slew of new "connectors" to financial information to give Claude access to real-time data. These include access to live market data via LSEG, as well as Moody's, and MT Newswires.

Earlier this month, it released half a dozen Agent Skills targeted at financial tasks, including company comparisons, discounted cash flow models, and earnings analyses.

When it comes to Claude for Excel, the LLM vendor's FAQs promise that it is trained to "recognize common financial modelling patterns, formula structures, and industry-standard calculations." Nevertheless, it warns users to "verify outputs match your specific methodologies."

They also caution that Claude for Excel will work within an enterprise's existing security frameworks, before warning: "Claude can make mistakes, so you should always review changes before finalizing, especially for client-facing deliverables."

Case studies for analytics and automation vendors alike trumpet managers' efforts to get users off Excel and onto something that allows them to standardize models, processes, and data.

That's understandable given some of the screw-ups that over-reliance on unwieldy and/or badly managed spreadsheets has caused.

Earlier this year, it emerged that New Zealand was managing its entire public health system via a single spreadsheet. This contributed to concerns about the organization's ability to track its true financial position. A review noted, among other things, that the system was "highly prone to human error, such as accidental typing of a number or omission of a zero."

Back in 2023, recruitment of trainee anesthetists across England and Wales was plunged into confusion thanks to a complex and muddled approach to using spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, the ease with which spreadsheets can be shared – and the potentially disastrous consequences – were highlighted by the UK's Afghan data breach scandal.

And there's no shortage of multimillion or even billion-dollar losses in the finance world thanks to fat thumbs, copy and paste errors, and worse in Excel.

If Claude was able to spot the outline of a misplaced finger with the potential to tip the world economy into meltdown, that really would be an advance. ®