What is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge, huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar work. Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets would be a big productivity boost for many employees.
My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
I'm a co-founder of Calcapp, an app builder for formula-driven apps using Excel-like formulas. I spent a couple of days using Claude Code to build 20 new templates for us, and I was blown away. It was able to one-shot most apps, generating competent, intricate apps from having looked at a sample JSON file I put together. I briefly told it about extensions we had made to Excel functions (including lambdas for FILTER, named sort type enums for XMATCH, etc), and it picked those up immediately.
At one point, it generated a verbose formula and mentioned, off-handedly, that it would have been prettier had Calcapp supported LET. "It does!", I replied, "and as an extension, you can use := instead of , to separate names and values!") and it promptly rewrote it using our extended syntax, producing a sleek formula.
These templates were for various verticals, like real estate, financial planning and retail, and I would have been hard-pressed to produce them without Claude's domain knowledge. And I did it in a weekend! Well, "we" did it in a weekend.
So this development doesn't really surprise me. I'm sure that Claude will be right at home in Excel, and I have already thought about how great it would be if Claude Code found a permanent home in our app designer. I'm concerned about the cost, though, so I'm holding off for now. But it does seem unfair that I get to use Claude to write apps with Calcapp, while our customers don't get that privilege.
Seems everyone is speculating features instead of just reading TFA which does in fact list features:
- Get answers about any cell in seconds:
Navigate complex models instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets, or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
- Test scenarios without breaking formulas:
Update assumptions across your entire model while preserving all dependencies. Test different scenarios quickly—Claude highlights every change with explanations for full transparency.
- Debug and fix errors:
Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference errors to their source in seconds. Claude explains what went wrong and how to fix it without disrupting the rest of your model.
- Build models or fill existing templates:
Create draft financial models from scratch based on your requirements. Or populate existing templates with fresh data while maintaining all formulas and structure.
They can try, but doubt anyone serious will adopt it.
Tried integrating chatgpt into my finance job to see how far I can get. Mega jikes...millions of dollars of hallucinated mistakes.
Worse you don't have the same tight feedback loop you've got in programming that'll tell you when something is wrong. Compile errors, unit tests etc. You basically need to walk through everything it did to figure out what's real and what's hallucinations. Basically fails silently. If they roll that out at scale in the financial system...interesting times ahead.
Still presumably there is something around spreadsheets it'll be able to do - the spreadsheet equivalent of boilerplate code whatever that may be
Anthropic is in a weird place for me right now. They're growing fast , creating little projects that i'd love to try, but their customer service was so bad for me as a max subscriber that I set an ethical boundary for myself to avoid their services until such point that it appears that they care about their customers whatsoever.
I keep searching for a sign, but everyone I talk to has horror stories. It sucks as a technologist that just wants to play with the thing; oh well.
From the signup form mentioning Private Equity / Venture Capital, Hedge Fund, Investment Banking... this seems squarely aimed at financial modeling. Which is really, really cool.
I've worked alongside sell-side investment bankers in a prior startup, and so much of the work is in taking a messy set of statements from a company, understanding the underlying assumptions, and building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding, 3-statement models that not only adhere to standard conventions (perhaps best introed by https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/build-integrated-3-... ) but also are highly customized for different assumptions that can range from seasonality to sensitivity to creative deal structures.
It is quite common for people to pull many, many all-nighters to try to tweak these models in response to a senior banker or a client having an idea! And one might argue there are way too many similar-looking numbers to keep a human banker from "hallucinating," much less an LLM.
But fundamentally, a 3-statement model and all its build-sheets are a dependency graph with loosely connected human-readable labels, and that means you can write tools that let an LLM crawl that dependency graph in a reliable and semantically meaningful way. And that lets you build really cool things, really fast.
I'm of the opinion that giving small companies the ability to present their finances to investors, the same way Fortune 500 companies hire armies of bankers to do, is vital to a healthy economy, and to giving Main Street the best possible chance to succeed and grow. This is a massive step in the right direction.
This is going to be massive if it works as well as I suspect it might.
I think many software engineers overlook how many companies have huge (billion dollar) processes run through Excel.
It's much less about 'greenfield' new excel sheets and much more about fixing/improving existing ones. If it works as well as Claude Code works for code, then it will get pretty crazy adoption I suspect (unless Microsoft beats them to it).
The thing really missing from multi-megabyte excel sheets of business critical carnage was a non-deterministic rewrite tool. It'll interact excitingly with the industry standard of no automated testing whatsoever.
I 100% believe generative AI can change a spreadsheet. Turn the xslx into text, mutate that, turn it back into an xslx, throw it away if it didn't parse at all. The result will look pretty similar to the original too, since spreadsheets are great at showing immediately local context and nothing else.
Also, we've done a pretty good job of training people that chatgpt works great, so there's good reason for them to expect claude for excel to work great too.
I'd really like the results of this to be considered negligence with non-survivable fines for the reckless stupidity, but more likely, it'll be seen as an act of god. Like all the other broken shit in the IT world.
I'm not excited about having LLMs generate spreadsheets or formulas. But, I think LLMs could be particularly useful in helping me find inconsistent formulas or errors that are challenging to identify. Especially in larger, complex spreadsheets touched by multiple people over the course of months.
So cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel. Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come from the ability to use AI _as_ a formula. For example, =PROMPT("Classify user feedback as positive, neutral or negative", A1). This would enable normal people (non-programmers) to fire off thousands of prompts at once and automate workflows like programmers do (disclaimer: I am the author of Cellm that does exactly this). Combined with Excel's built-in functions for deterministic work, Claude could really kill the whole copy-pasting data in and out of chat windows for bulk-processing data.
On the first glance this seems to be a very bad idea. But re-readig this:
> Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets, or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
this might just be an excellent tool for refactoring Excel sheets into something more robust and maintainable. And making a bunch of suits redundant.
The best thing that can come from this is unit tests for Excel.
LLMs work best when they can call tools (edit the sheet) and test their results in a loop.
It's like the "value seek" thing Excel has had since forever; "adjust these values until this cell is X"
Excel doesn't have any way to verify that every formula in that 60k line sheet is correct and someone hasn't accidentally replaced one with a static number for example.
On a related note, has anyone found a good local LLM option for working with Excel files?
Here's my use case: I have a set of responses from a survey and want to perform sentiment analysis on them, classify them, etc. Ideally, I'd like to feed them one at a time to a local LLM with a prompt like: "Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic...etc".
If I dump the whole spreadsheet into ChatGPT, I found that because of the context window, it can get "lazy"; while with a local LLM, I could just literally prompt it one row at a time to accomplish my goal, even if it takes a little longer in terms of GPU and wall-clock time.
However, I can't find anything that works off the shelf like this. It seems like a prime use case for local models.
AI can definitely save time, but sometimes it hides the real problems. Most spreadsheet issues aren’t math errors they’re logic messes. Claude can fix your sheet, but it can’t fix your company culture.
I've worked at MULTIPLE million dollar firms whose entire business relies on 10 Excel workbooks that were created 30 years ago by a person who is either passed on or retired.
Give users who aren't intimately knowledgeable with their source material ai, and you're asking for trouble.
The undo function has a history limit.
The real issue is: at what point are we going to stop chasing efficiency and profit at the sake of humanity?
Claude and OpenAI are built on stretched truths, stolen creativity and what-if statements.
IMO, a real solution here has to be hybrid, not full LLM, because these sheets can be massive and have very complicated structures. You want to be able to use the LLM to identify / map column headers, while using non-LLM tool calling to run Excel operations like SUMIFs or VLOOKUPs. One of the most important traits in these systems is consistency with slight variation in file layout, as so much Excel work involves consolidating / reconciling between reports made on a quarterly basis or produced by a variety of sources, with different reporting structures.
Disclosure: My company builds ingestion pipelines for large multi-tab Excel files, PDFs, and CSVs.
I’m decent at excel, but not amazing. I’ve tried again and again to use LLMs including Claude to solve specific, small, well defined problems in excel with a 0% success rate. My experience so far has been if I can’t do it LLMs can’t either.
If LLMs are a 6/10 right now at basic coding then they’re a 3/10 at excel from my experience.
Maybe this is how we get code versioning for Excel.
Git LFS for workbook + the following prompt
:
“Create a commit explains what has changed in the workbook since the last commit. Be brief, but explain the change in business terms as well as code change terms.”
I wonder if this will be more/less useful than what we have with AI in software development.
There's a lot less to understand than a whole codebase.
I don't do spreadsheets very often, but I can emphasize with tracking down "Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference errors to their source in seconds." I once hit something like that, and I found it a lot harder to trace a typical compiler error.
I guess Claude maybe useful for finding errors in large Excel Workbooks.
May also help beginners to learn the more complex Excel functions (which are still pretty easy).
But if you are proficient at building Excel models I don't see any benefit.
Excel already has a superb very efficient UI for entering formulas, ranges, tables, data sources etc I'm sceptical that a different UI especially a text based one can improve on this.
Gemini already has its hooks in Google Sheets, and to be honest, I've found it very helpful in constructing semi-complicated Excel formulas.
Being able to select a few rows and then use plain language to describe what I want done is a time saver, even though I could probably muddle through the formulas if I needed to.
Pretty cool idea — AI inside spreadsheets makes sense since most of our work already lives there. But I’m a bit cautious too — spreadsheets are messy enough, and adding probabilistic AI could make mistakes harder to spot. Useful if done right, risky if not.
Interesting their X post mentions "pre-built Agent Skills" but it's not on the webpage. I wonder if they will give you the ability to edit/add/delete Skills, that would be phenomenal.
George Hotz said there's 5 tiers of AI systems, Tier 1 - Data centers, Tier 2 - fabs, Tier 3 - chip makers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers. He said Tier 4 is going to eat all the value of Tier 5, and that Tier 5 is worthless. It's looking like that's going to be the case
I have just launched a product (easyanalytica.com) to create dashboards from spreadsheets, and Excel is on my to-do list of formats to be supported. However, I'm having second thoughts. Although, from the description, it seems like it would be more helpful on the modeling side rather than the presentation side. I guess I'll have to wait until it's publicly available
As I was reading through the post, and the comments here, and pondering my own many hours with these tools, I was suddenly reminded of one of my favorite studio C sketches: An Unfortunate Fortune
From their FAQ “Claude doesn’t have advanced Excel capabilities including pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation, data tables, macros, and VBA. We’re actively working on these features.”
It’s interesting to me that this page talks a lot about “debugging models” etc. I would’ve expected (from the title) this to be going after the average excel user, similar to how chatgpt went after every day people.
I would’ve expected “make a vlookup or pivot table that tells me x” or “make this data look good for a slide deck” to be easier problems to solve.
Anyone understand how this could work? My mental model for llm is predictive text but here how can it understand cell A1 which has a string is the “header” for all values under it? How does it learn to understand table data like that?
As an inveterate Excel lover, I can just sense the blinding pain wafting off the legions of accountants, associates, seniors, and tech people who keep the machine spirits placated.
lies, damn lies, statistics, and then Excel deciding cell data types.
I'm excited to see what national disasters will be caused by auto-generated Excel sheets that nobody on the planet understands. A few selections from past HN threads to prime your imagination:
If Claude is going to work on the underpinning technology of every business in the Capitalist world, We should let Claude loose on the COBOL code out there too, I can't imagine anything going wrong.
Yeah now tell the Auditors that the financial spreadsheet we have here has AI touching it left and right. "I did not cook the books I promise it is the AI that made our financials seem better than they actually are trust me bro!", said Joe from Accounting.
Yet more evidence of the bubble burst being imminent. If any of these companies really had some almost-AGI system internally, they wouldn’t be spending any effort making f’ing Excel plugins. Or at the very least, they’d be writing their own Excel because AI is so amazing at coding, right?
If this works very well and reliable, it might not kill programming as such, but it might put a lot of small businesses who do custom software for other small businesses out of work.
Been working with Claude Code lately and been pretty impressed.
If this works as well could be a nice add on. Its probably a smart market to enter as Excel is essentially everywhere.
Just like Claude Code allows 1 dev to potentially do the work of 2 or 3, I could see this allowing 1 accountant or operations person to do the work of 2 or 3. Financial savings but human cost
If AI turns out to be the powerhouse it is claimed to be, AI's impact will be corporations replacing corporate dependencies upon 'Excel projects' created by self-taught assistants to department managers.
Cool but now companies POs will be like "you must add the Excel export for all the user data!" and when asked why, will basically be "so I can do this roundabout query of data for some number in a spreadsheet using AI (instead of just putting the number or chart directly in the product with a simple db call)"
Claude for Excel
(claude.com)655 points by meetpateltech 27 October 2025 | 445 comments
Comments
My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
At one point, it generated a verbose formula and mentioned, off-handedly, that it would have been prettier had Calcapp supported LET. "It does!", I replied, "and as an extension, you can use := instead of , to separate names and values!") and it promptly rewrote it using our extended syntax, producing a sleek formula.
These templates were for various verticals, like real estate, financial planning and retail, and I would have been hard-pressed to produce them without Claude's domain knowledge. And I did it in a weekend! Well, "we" did it in a weekend.
So this development doesn't really surprise me. I'm sure that Claude will be right at home in Excel, and I have already thought about how great it would be if Claude Code found a permanent home in our app designer. I'm concerned about the cost, though, so I'm holding off for now. But it does seem unfair that I get to use Claude to write apps with Calcapp, while our customers don't get that privilege.
(I wrote more about integrating Claude Code here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662229)
- Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets, or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
- Test scenarios without breaking formulas: Update assumptions across your entire model while preserving all dependencies. Test different scenarios quickly—Claude highlights every change with explanations for full transparency.
- Debug and fix errors: Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference errors to their source in seconds. Claude explains what went wrong and how to fix it without disrupting the rest of your model.
- Build models or fill existing templates: Create draft financial models from scratch based on your requirements. Or populate existing templates with fresh data while maintaining all formulas and structure.
Tried integrating chatgpt into my finance job to see how far I can get. Mega jikes...millions of dollars of hallucinated mistakes.
Worse you don't have the same tight feedback loop you've got in programming that'll tell you when something is wrong. Compile errors, unit tests etc. You basically need to walk through everything it did to figure out what's real and what's hallucinations. Basically fails silently. If they roll that out at scale in the financial system...interesting times ahead.
Still presumably there is something around spreadsheets it'll be able to do - the spreadsheet equivalent of boilerplate code whatever that may be
I keep searching for a sign, but everyone I talk to has horror stories. It sucks as a technologist that just wants to play with the thing; oh well.
I've worked alongside sell-side investment bankers in a prior startup, and so much of the work is in taking a messy set of statements from a company, understanding the underlying assumptions, and building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding, 3-statement models that not only adhere to standard conventions (perhaps best introed by https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/build-integrated-3-... ) but also are highly customized for different assumptions that can range from seasonality to sensitivity to creative deal structures.
It is quite common for people to pull many, many all-nighters to try to tweak these models in response to a senior banker or a client having an idea! And one might argue there are way too many similar-looking numbers to keep a human banker from "hallucinating," much less an LLM.
But fundamentally, a 3-statement model and all its build-sheets are a dependency graph with loosely connected human-readable labels, and that means you can write tools that let an LLM crawl that dependency graph in a reliable and semantically meaningful way. And that lets you build really cool things, really fast.
I'm of the opinion that giving small companies the ability to present their finances to investors, the same way Fortune 500 companies hire armies of bankers to do, is vital to a healthy economy, and to giving Main Street the best possible chance to succeed and grow. This is a massive step in the right direction.
I think many software engineers overlook how many companies have huge (billion dollar) processes run through Excel.
It's much less about 'greenfield' new excel sheets and much more about fixing/improving existing ones. If it works as well as Claude Code works for code, then it will get pretty crazy adoption I suspect (unless Microsoft beats them to it).
I 100% believe generative AI can change a spreadsheet. Turn the xslx into text, mutate that, turn it back into an xslx, throw it away if it didn't parse at all. The result will look pretty similar to the original too, since spreadsheets are great at showing immediately local context and nothing else.
Also, we've done a pretty good job of training people that chatgpt works great, so there's good reason for them to expect claude for excel to work great too.
I'd really like the results of this to be considered negligence with non-survivable fines for the reckless stupidity, but more likely, it'll be seen as an act of god. Like all the other broken shit in the IT world.
> Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets, or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
this might just be an excellent tool for refactoring Excel sheets into something more robust and maintainable. And making a bunch of suits redundant.
LLMs work best when they can call tools (edit the sheet) and test their results in a loop.
It's like the "value seek" thing Excel has had since forever; "adjust these values until this cell is X"
Excel doesn't have any way to verify that every formula in that 60k line sheet is correct and someone hasn't accidentally replaced one with a static number for example.
Here's my use case: I have a set of responses from a survey and want to perform sentiment analysis on them, classify them, etc. Ideally, I'd like to feed them one at a time to a local LLM with a prompt like: "Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic...etc".
If I dump the whole spreadsheet into ChatGPT, I found that because of the context window, it can get "lazy"; while with a local LLM, I could just literally prompt it one row at a time to accomplish my goal, even if it takes a little longer in terms of GPU and wall-clock time.
However, I can't find anything that works off the shelf like this. It seems like a prime use case for local models.
I've worked at MULTIPLE million dollar firms whose entire business relies on 10 Excel workbooks that were created 30 years ago by a person who is either passed on or retired.
Give users who aren't intimately knowledgeable with their source material ai, and you're asking for trouble.
The undo function has a history limit.
The real issue is: at what point are we going to stop chasing efficiency and profit at the sake of humanity?
Claude and OpenAI are built on stretched truths, stolen creativity and what-if statements.
Disclosure: My company builds ingestion pipelines for large multi-tab Excel files, PDFs, and CSVs.
If LLMs are a 6/10 right now at basic coding then they’re a 3/10 at excel from my experience.
Git LFS for workbook + the following prompt :
“Create a commit explains what has changed in the workbook since the last commit. Be brief, but explain the change in business terms as well as code change terms.”
There's a lot less to understand than a whole codebase.
I don't do spreadsheets very often, but I can emphasize with tracking down "Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference errors to their source in seconds." I once hit something like that, and I found it a lot harder to trace a typical compiler error.
https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/document-skil...
Being able to select a few rows and then use plain language to describe what I want done is a time saver, even though I could probably muddle through the formulas if I needed to.
Edit: found it on their other blog post https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-psoWdSpo
Curious, if others see the connection. :D
If this works right, this could be a game changer.
* Claude for Chrome * Gemini for Chrome * ChatGPT Atlas * ...
will be built on top of the ACP protocol, so that these “AI extensions” to everything can become standardized
Sounds like there's some sort of an AI race after finance people and businesses?
It will, however, make people resort more quickly to "I guess it's just not possible if Claude can't figure it out".
— Zack Korman, <https://x.com/ZackKorman/status/1974828240679166396>
I would’ve expected “make a vlookup or pivot table that tells me x” or “make this data look good for a slide deck” to be easier problems to solve.
There are quite a few spreadsheet apps out there, just curious what their implementation is or how it's implemented to work with multiple apps.
I always find Excel (and the Office ecosystem) confusing heh.
Banking secrecy laws + customer identifying data + AI tool = No bueno.
lies, damn lies, statistics, and then Excel deciding cell data types.
Thousands of unreported COVID cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247
Thousands of errors in genetics research papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950
Wrong winner announced in national election: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197280
Countries across the world implement counter-productive economic austerity programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
Only a matter of time before someone does it though.
The HN bubble might not realize the implications.
Just like Claude Code allows 1 dev to potentially do the work of 2 or 3, I could see this allowing 1 accountant or operations person to do the work of 2 or 3. Financial savings but human cost