Stay Ahead of the Curve
Latest AI news, expert analysis, bold opinions, and key trends — delivered to your inbox.
Anthropic Expands Claude With Direct Excel Access
2 min read Anthropic expanded Claude’s Excel access, allowing it to directly analyze spreadsheets, run calculations, and surface insights. It’s a push toward AI that does the work, not just explains it — and a direct challenge to Copilot-style productivity tools. January 27, 2026 13:25
The company has expanded Claude’s ability to work directly with Excel files, letting users analyze spreadsheets, manipulate data, and generate insights without jumping between tools.
What’s new
With improved Excel access, Claude can now:
-
Read and summarize large spreadsheets
-
Perform calculations and data transformations
-
Spot trends, anomalies, and patterns
-
Help build formulas or explain existing ones in plain English
For analysts, marketers, and ops teams, this turns Claude into a hands-on spreadsheet assistant, not just a chat interface.
Why this matters
Excel remains one of the most widely used business tools in the world — and also one of the most time-consuming. By embedding AI directly into spreadsheet workflows, Anthropic is:
-
Reducing manual data work
-
Lowering the barrier for non-technical users
-
Competing more directly with Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s AI features
The bigger picture
This move signals where AI is headed next: less prompting, more doing. Instead of explaining what to do in Excel, Claude increasingly just does it.
Bottom line:
As AI assistants plug directly into core productivity tools, the real competition isn’t model quality anymore — it’s who owns the workflow.
AI Agents