Claude for Excel - Hacker News

Posted by meetpateltech 10/27/2025

684 points | 459 commentspage 4

pdyc 10/27/2025||

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

sunnybeetroot 10/27/2025|

Why second thoughts?

pdyc 10/27/2025||

everyone will use claude if they support it why would they use my product. so i will have to find some other angle to differentiate.

wonderwonder 10/27/2025||

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

travisgriggs 10/27/2025||

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

soared 10/27/2025||

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.

extr 10/27/2025||

I think actually Anthropic themselves are having trouble with imagining how this could be used. Coders think like coders - they are imagining the primary use case being managing large Excel sheets that are like big programs. In reality most Excel worksheets are more like tiny, one-off programs. More like scripts than applications. AI is very very good at scripts.

layer8 10/27/2025|||

The issue is that the average Excel user doesn’t quite have the skills to validate and double-check the Excel formulas that Claude would produce, and to correct them if needed. It would be similar to a non-programmer vibe-coding an app. And that’s really not what you want to happen for professionally used Excel sheets.

soared 10/27/2025||

IMO that is exactly what people want. At my work everyone uses LLMs constantly and the trade off of not perfect information is known. People double check it, etc, but the information search is so much faster even if it finds the right confluence but misquotes it, it still sends me the link.

For easy spreadsheet stuff (which 80% of average white collars workers are doing when using excel) I’d imagine the same approach. Try to do what I want, and even if you’re half wrong the good 50% is still worth it and a better starting point.

Vibe coding an app is like vibe coding a “model in excel”. Sure you could try, but most people just need to vibe code a pivot table

burkaman 10/27/2025||

I think this is aiming to be Claude Code for people who use Excel as a programming environment.

matthewfelgate 10/29/2025||

I tried https://sanand0.github.io/llmexcel/#/ yesterday but it's very slow.

Not sure if this Claud for Excel can do the same thing and run =claude() inside Excel cells?

gedy 10/27/2025||

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)"

unshavedyak 10/27/2025||

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.

p_ing 10/27/2025|

Modern Excel add-ins work in desktop Windows, macOS, and web. They're just a bit of XML that Excel looks at to call a whatever web endpoint is defined in the XML.

lionkor 10/27/2025||

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".

dosnem 10/27/2025|

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?

brookst 10/27/2025||

LLMs already understand table data. "Predictive text" is somewhat true but so reductive that it leads to that kind of misconception.

HN is going to mangle this but here's a quick table:

| Type of Horse | Average Height | Typical Color | |----------------|----------------|-----------------| | Arabian | 15 hh | Bay, Gray | | Thoroughbred | 16 hh | Chestnut, Bay | | Clydesdale | 17.5 hh | Bay with White | | Shetland Pony | 10.5 hh | Black, Chestnut |

And after a prompt "pivot the table so rows are colors":

| Typical Color | Type of Horse | Average Height | |----------------|----------------------------------------|-----------------------| | Bay | Arabian, Thoroughbred, Clydesdale | 15 hh, 16 hh, 17.5 hh | | Gray | Arabian | 15 hh | | Chestnut | Thoroughbred, Shetland Pony | 16 hh, 10.5 hh | | Bay with White | Clydesdale | 17.5 hh | | Black | Shetland Pony | 10.5 hh |

bonsai_spool 10/27/2025||

> 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?

I imagine it uses the new Agent Skills features

https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills

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