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My First Experiences with Claude in Excel
I’ve been experimenting with Claude in Excel for a few days, and I’m both excited and underwhelmed. Video demo below plus the article summary that follows…
Anthropic’s support page for Claude in Excel.
Microsoft’s Marketplace listing for the Claude in Excel add-on.
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Claude in Excel: Promising, Polished… and Still Limited
I’ve been testing Claude inside Excel for a few days now, and my reaction lands squarely in the middle: excited by the direction, underwhelmed by the execution.
On paper, this integration checks a lot of boxes. Claude lives directly inside Excel as an add-in, opens a familiar chat sidebar, and can read and act on your workbook. You can ask it to analyze data, clean things up, build summaries, and even generate pivots or charts. If you’ve ever bounced between a spreadsheet and an LLM tab, the appeal is obvious.
But once you start using it for real spreadsheet work, the cracks show.
What Claude in Excel Does Well
The setup is straightforward. Install the add-in from the Microsoft marketplace, open it from the Excel toolbar, and you’re off. Claude immediately understands your sheet context, which is genuinely useful.
A few things it does well:
Generating dummy data quickly for demos or testing
Spotting formatting issues, like date columns that came in as serial values
Summarizing datasets and surfacing high-level insights without much prompting
For beginners or casual Excel users, this feels powerful. You can ask questions in plain English and get something usable without knowing formulas, pivots, or charts.
Where It Falls Short (Fast)
Once you move past surface-level tasks, it’s just not perfect (see my video demo above for examples).
A few pain points stood out immediately:
Hardcoded results instead of formulas
Claude often outputs static numbers where formulas should live. That defeats the entire purpose of working in Excel.Outdated formula choices
I saw INDEX/MATCH and even VLOOKUP-style logic where modern functions like XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, or GROUP BY would have been cleaner and more flexible.Limited sheet control
Simple actions like merging across cells or applying structural formatting aren’t fully supported. In some cases, Claude just explains what you should do instead of doing it.Heavy rate limiting
This is the biggest issue. After only a handful of small prompts, some of them simple yes/no follow-ups, I hit Claude’s usage cap. That makes sustained spreadsheet work frustrating and unreliable.
The Bigger Takeaway
Claude in Excel is not a replacement for spreadsheet knowledge.
If you don’t already understand pivots, lookups, summaries, and basic modeling, you won’t know when Claude’s output is wrong, inefficient, or brittle. And if you do know those things, you’ll often find it faster to just build them yourself.
That said, I do like the direction. Embedded AI inside tools like Excel is clearly where things are headed.
There are interesting efforts underway to reduce token usage and improve efficiency in Claude-based workflows, and if those pan out, this could become much more compelling. But today? For my use case, it’s a nice sidebar; not a must-have.
My recommendation for now is:
learn spreadsheets first, then use AI as an assistant, not a crutch.
If you’re a beginner, check out my free 7-day course which covers the basics.
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