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.

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

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

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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-psoWdSpo

Curious, if others see the connection. :D

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.

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)"

There's already a language for this, or multiple, that isn't English. Not having to use this language is NOT going to make anything better.

It will, however, make people resort more quickly to "I guess it's just not possible if Claude can't figure it out".

Dumb question, but is this Claude for Excel the.. app? The webapp? Does it work on Google sheets? etc

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.