Claude for Excel - Hacker News

Posted by meetpateltech 10/27/2025

684 points | 459 commentspage 5

hufdr 10/28/2025|

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.

keernan 10/27/2025||

If AI turns out to be the powerhouse it is claimed to be, AI's impact will be corporations replacing corporate dependencies upon 'Excel projects' created by self-taught assistants to department managers.

klausnrooster 10/28/2025||

I'd like to see it compete in the Financial Modeling World Cup, say in Las Vegas this December. https://excel-esports.com

voidmain0001 10/28/2025||

From their FAQ “Claude doesn’t have advanced Excel capabilities including pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation, data tables, macros, and VBA. We’re actively working on these features.”

6thbit 10/28/2025||

Last week OpenAI hired ex-investment bankers to train a model to build financial models, now anthropic coming for excel.

Sounds like there's some sort of an AI race after finance people and businesses?

SteveLauC 10/28/2025||

I really hope that all these kinds of integrations:

* Claude for Chrome * Gemini for Chrome * ChatGPT Atlas * ...

will be built on top of the ACP protocol, so that these “AI extensions” to everything can become standardized

mamonster 10/27/2025||

On the one hand, most financial companies have a lot of processes in Excel that could be made better with something like Claude.

Banking secrecy laws + customer identifying data + AI tool = No bueno.

anshulbhide 10/28/2025||

Just spent an hour trying to figure out how to create a waterfall chart. ChatGPT's python interpreter failed.

If this works right, this could be a game changer.

fragmede 10/28/2025|

https://chatgpt.com/share/69005eec-6ee0-8009-a8d3-ebb1c30e72...

took me four prompts to do generate a waterfall chart using d3 js because it didn't want to run it. obviously with real numbers and not generated data, you'd need to check the results thoroughly.

burkaman 10/27/2025|

I'm excited to see what national disasters will be caused by auto-generated Excel sheets that nobody on the planet understands. A few selections from past HN threads to prime your imagination:

Thousands of unreported COVID cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247

Thousands of errors in genetics research papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950

Wrong winner announced in national election: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197280

Countries across the world implement counter-productive economic austerity programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

HPsquared 10/27/2025||

Especially combined with the dynamic array formulas that have recently been added (LET, LAMBDA etc). You can have much more going on within each cell now. Think whole temporary data structures. The "evaluate formula" dialog doesn't quite cut it anymore for debugging.

malthaus 10/27/2025||

from my experience in the corporate world, i'd trust an excel generated / checked by an LLM more than i would one that has been organically grown over years in a big corporation where nobody ever checks or even can check anything because its one big growing pile of technical debt people just accept as working

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