Claude for Excel - Hacker News

Posted by meetpateltech 10/27/2025

684 points | 459 commentspage 7

bugsense 10/28/2025||

That’s it. 1T EV added.

strange_quark 10/27/2025||

Yet more evidence of the bubble burst being imminent. If any of these companies really had some almost-AGI system internally, they wouldn’t be spending any effort making f’ing Excel plugins. Or at the very least, they’d be writing their own Excel because AI is so amazing at coding, right?

HDThoreaun 10/27/2025||

The current valuations do not require AGI. They require products like this that will replace scores of people doing computer based grunt work. MSFT is worth $4 trillion off the back of enterprise productivity software, the AI labs just need some of that money.

ipaddr 10/27/2025|||

You make a great point. Where is all of the complex applications? They haven't been able to create than own office suite or word processor or really anything aside from a halloween matching game in js. You would think we would have some complex application they can point to but nothing.

mitjam 10/27/2025|||

Excel is living business knowlege stuck in private SharePoint Sites, tappimg into it might kick off a nice data flywheel not to speak of the nice TAM.

qsort 10/27/2025|||

You wouldn't believe the amount of shit that runs on Excel.

powvans 10/27/2025|||

Yes. I once interviewed a developer who’s previous job was maintaining the .NET application that used an Excel sheet as the brain for decisions about where to drill for oil on the sea floor. No one understood what was in the Excel sheet. It was built by a geologist who was long gone. The engineering team understood the inputs and outputs. That’s all they needed to know.

mwigdahl 10/27/2025||

Years ago when I worked for an engineering consulting company we had to work with a similarly complex, opaque Excel spreadsheet from General Electric modeling the operation of a nuclear power plant in exacting detail.

Same deal there -- the original author was a genius and was the only person who knew how it was set up or how it worked.

strange_quark 10/27/2025||||

I think you’re misunderstanding me. This might be something somewhat useful, I don’t know, and I’m not judging it based on that.

What I’m saying is that if you really believed we were 2, maybe 3 years tops from AGI or the singularity or whatever you would spend 0 effort serving what already seems to be a domain that is already served by 3rd parties that are already using your models! An excel wrapper for an LLM isn’t exactly cutting edge AI research.

They’re desperate to find something that someone will pay a meaningful amount of money for that even remotely justifies their valuation and continued investment.

cube00 10/27/2025||||

I spotted a custom dialog in an Excel spreadsheet in a medical context the other day, I was horrified.

dickersnoodle 10/27/2025||||

Sic

efields 10/27/2025|||

This. I work in Pharma. Excel and faxes.

pton_xd 10/27/2025|||

The fine tuning will continue until we reach AGI.

amlib 10/27/2025||

The fine tuning will continue until we reach the torment nexus, at best

FergusArgyll 10/27/2025||

A program that can do excel for you is almost AGI

mainecoder 10/27/2025||

Yeah now tell the Auditors that the financial spreadsheet we have here has AI touching it left and right. "I did not cook the books I promise it is the AI that made our financials seem better than they actually are trust me bro!", said Joe from Accounting.

grim_io 10/27/2025||

If this works very well and reliable, it might not kill programming as such, but it might put a lot of small businesses who do custom software for other small businesses out of work.

The HN bubble might not realize the implications.

racl101 10/27/2025||

This could be huge! Very exciting!

surume 10/27/2025||

Checkmate, Altman

ada1981 10/27/2025||

Can we get it in Sheets?

frankacter 10/28/2025|

for sheets, Gemini exists already natively.

Alternatively, Perplexity Comet browser (or OpenAI Atlas) would presumably provide sidebar functionality to act within your spreadsheets.

ada1981 11/4/2025||

I would really like Claude in there.

dekerklas 11/5/2025||

[dead]

sherinjosephroy 10/28/2025|

[flagged]

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