Claude for Excel - Hacker News

Posted by meetpateltech 10/27/2025

684 points | 459 commentspage 2

intended 10/27/2025|

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.

NumberCruncher 10/27/2025||

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.

alex43578 10/27/2025||

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.

sexy_seedbox 10/28/2025||

Cellm + Ollamma?

https://docs.getcellm.com/models/local-models

alex43578 10/28/2025||

That looks like a great fit! Not sure how I missed it, but I appreciate the link.

santadays 10/27/2025||

Don't know about excel, but for Google Sheets. You can ask chatgpt to write you a appsscript custom function e.g CALL_OPENAI. Then you can pass in variables into. =CALL_OPEN("Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic: "&A1)

thisguy47 10/27/2025||

Sheets also has an `AI` formula now that you can use to invoke Gemini models directly.

santadays 10/28/2025||

When I tried the Gemini/AI formula it didn’t work very well, gpt-5 mini or nano are cheap and generally do what you want if you are asking something straightforward about a piece of content you give them. You can also give a json schema to make the results more deterministic.

michaelmarkell 10/27/2025||

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.

dcre 10/27/2025||

That's exactly what they're doing.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...

levocardia 10/27/2025||

"This won't work because (something obvious that engineers at Anthropic clearly thought of already)"

michaelmarkell 10/27/2025||

Not really. Take for example:

item, date, price

abc, 01/01/2023, $30

cde, 02/01/2023, $40

... 100k rows ...

subtotal. $1000

def, 03/01,2023, $20

"Hey Claude, what's the total from this file? > grep for headers > "Ah, I see column 3 is the price value" > SUM(C2:C) -> $2020 > "Great! I found your total!"

If you can find me an example of tech that can solve this at scale on large, diverse Excel formats, then I'll concede, but I haven't found something actually trustworthy for important data sets

stevenhuang 10/28/2025||

That's a basic tool call that current models already can do well. All the sql query generation LLMs can do this for example.

sunnybeetroot 10/27/2025||

So more or less like what AI has been doing for the last couple of years when it comes to writing code?

flowingfocus 10/27/2025||

Version control and meaningful diffs for .xlsx will be in high demand in a few months

andyferris 10/27/2025|

Honestly those things are well past due - if this tips the scales then I hope we can all benefit.

d--b 10/27/2025||

Ok, they weren't confident enough to let the model actually edit the spreadsheet. Phew..

Only a matter of time before someone does it though.

password4321 10/27/2025||

How well does change tracking work in Excel... how hard would it be to review LLM changes?

AFAIK there is no 'git for Excel to diff and undo', especially not built-in (aka 'for free' both cost-wise and add-ons/macros not allowed security-wise).

My limited experience has been that it is difficult to keep LLMs from changing random things besides what they're asked to change, which could cause big problems if unattackable in Excel.

NewsaHackO 10/27/2025||

I thought there was track changes on all office products. Most Office documents are zip files of XML files and assets, so I'd imagine it would be possible to rollback changes.

cube00 10/27/2025|||

When I think how easy I can misclick to stuff up a spreadsheet I can't begin to imagine all the subtle ways LLMs will screw them up.

Unlike code where it's all on display, with all these formulas are hidden in each cell, you won't see the problem unless click on the cell so you'll have a hard time finding the cause.

tln 10/27/2025|||

I wish Gemini could edit more in Google sheets and docs.

Little stuff like splitting text more intelligently or following the formatting seen elsewhere would be very satisfying.

warthog 10/27/2025||

Tough day to be an AI Excel add-in startup

mitjam 10/27/2025||

Ask Rosie is actually shutting down right now: https://www.askrosie.ai/

I would love to learn more about their challenges as I have been working on an Excel AI add-in for quite some time and have followed Ask Rosie from almost their start.

That they now gone through the whole cycle worries me I‘m too slow as a solo building on the side in these fast paced times.

jonathanstrange 10/27/2025|||

That seems to be true for any startup that offers a wrapper to existing AIs rather than an AI on their own. The lucky ones might be bought but many if not most of them will perish trying to compete with companies that actually create AI models and companies large enough to integrate their own wrappers.

warthog 10/27/2025||

Actually just wrote about this: https://aimode.substack.com/p/openai-is-below-above-and-arou...

not sure if it binary like that but as startups we will probably collect the scraps leftover indeed instead

8note 10/27/2025||

its a great time for your ai excel add-in to start getting acquired by a claude competitor though

NotMichaelBay 10/27/2025||

Not OpenAI, though, because they already gave $14M to an AI Excel add-in startup (Endex)

StarterPro 10/28/2025||

HA!

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.

garyclarke27 10/27/2025||

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.

proteal 10/27/2025||

I understand the sentiment about a skilled user not needing this, but I think having a little buddy that I can use to offload some menial tasks would be helpful for me to iterate through my models more efficiently; even if the AI is not perfect. As a highly skilled excel user, I admit the software has terrible ergonomics. It would be a productivity boon for me if an AI can help me stay focused on model design vs model implementation.

intended 10/27/2025||

For some reason, I find that these tools are TERRIBLE at helping someone learn. I suspect because turning one on, results in turning the problem solving part of ones brain off.

Its obviously not the same experience for everyone. ( If you are one of those energized while working in a chat window, you might be in a minority - given what we see from the ongoing massacre of brains in education. )

Paraphrasing something I read here "people don't use ChatGPT to do learn more, they use it to study less".

Maybe some folk would be better off.

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