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Claude for Excel
- cube00 1y ago[flagged]
- sdsd 1y agoOkay. But then you could say the same for a human, isn't your brain just a cloud of matter and electricity that just reacts to senses deterministically?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cube00 1y ago> isn't your brain just a cloud of matter and electricity that just reacts to senses deterministically? LLMs are not deterministic. I'd argue over the short term humans are more deterministic. I ask a human the same question multiple times and I get the same answer. I ask an LLM and each answer could be very different depending on its "temperature".
- krzyk 1y agoIf you ask human the same question repeatedly, you'll get different answers. I think that at third you'll get "I already answered that" etc.
- worldsayshi 1y agoWe hardly react to things deterministically. But I agree with the sentiment. It seems it is more important than ever to agree on what it means to understand something.
- qwertox 1y agoI'm having a bad day today. I'm 100% certain that today I'll react completely different to any tiny issue compared to how I did yesterday.
- sdsd 1y agoRight, if you change the input to your function, you get a different output. By that logic, the function `(def (add a b) (+ a b)` isn't deterministic.
- NDizzle 1y agoI mean - try clicking the CoPilot button and see what it can actually do. Last I checked, it told me it couldn't change any of the actual data itself, but it could give you suggestions. Low bar for excellence here.
- baal80spam 1y agoOK then. Groks?
- dang 1y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- d--b 1y agoOk, they weren't confident enough to let the model actually edit the spreadsheet. Phew.. Only a matter of time before someone does it though.
- cube00 1y agoWhen 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tln 1y agoI 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.
- password4321 1y agoHow 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 1y agoI 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.
- strange_quark 1y agoYet 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?
- qsort 1y agoYou wouldn't believe the amount of shit that runs on Excel.
- efields 1y agoThis. I work in Pharma. Excel and faxes.
- powvans 1y agoYes. 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 1y agoYears 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.
- cube00 1y agoI spotted a custom dialog in an Excel spreadsheet in a medical context the other day, I was horrified.
- dickersnoodle 1y agoSic
- jawns 1y agoGemini already has its hooks in Google Sheets, and to be honest, I've found it very helpful in constructing semi-complicated Excel formulas. Being able to select a few rows and then use plain language to describe what I want done is a time saver, even though I could probably muddle through the formulas if I needed to.
- break_the_bank 1y agoI would recommend trying TabTabTab at https://tabtabtab.ai/ https://tabtabtab.ai/ It is an entire agent loop. You can ask it to build a multi sheet analysis of your favorite stock and it will. We are seeing a lot of early adopters use it for financial modeling, research automation, and internal reporting tasks that used to take hours.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoGemini integratoins to Google workspace feels like it's using Gemini 1.5 flash, it's so comically bad at understanding and generating
- gumby271 1y agoLast time I tried using Gemini in Google Sheets it hallucinated a bunch of fake data, then gave me a summary that included all that fake data. I'd given it a bunch of transaction data, and asked it to group the records into different categories for budgeting. When asking it to give the largest values in each category, all the values that came back were fake. I'm not sure I'd really trust it to touch a spreadsheet after that.
- soared 1y agoIt’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.
- burkaman 1y agoI think this is aiming to be Claude Code for people who use Excel as a programming environment.
- layer8 1y agoThe 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 1y agoIMO 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
- extr 1y agoI 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.
- burkaman 1y agoI'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247 Thousands of errors in genetics research papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950 Wrong winner announced in national election: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197280 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#Methodological_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
- HPsquared 1y agoEspecially 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 1y agofrom 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
- whalesalad 1y agoI just want Claude inside of Metabase.
- adamfeldman 1y agohttps://www.metabase.com/features/metabot-ai https://www.metabase.com/features/metabot-ai
- asdev 1y agoGeorge Hotz said there's 5 tiers of AI systems, Tier 1 - Data centers, Tier 2 - fabs, Tier 3 - chip makers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers. He said Tier 4 is going to eat all the value of Tier 5, and that Tier 5 is worthless. It's looking like that's going to be the case
- matsur 1y agoPeople were saying the same thing about AWS vs SaaS ("AWS wrappers") a decade ago and none of that came to pass. Same will be true here.
- tln 1y agoClaude is a model wrapper, no?
- piperswe 1y agoAnthropic is a frontier lab, and Claude is a frontier model
- extr 1y agoGeorge Hotz says a lot of things. I think he's directionally correct but you could apply this argument to tech as a whole. Even outside of AI, there are plenty of niches where domain-specific solutions matter quite a bit but are too small for the big players to focus on.
- extr 1y agoWhat is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge, huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar work. Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets would be a big productivity boost for many employees. My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
- cube00 1y agoI don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet. It's one thing to fudge the language in a report summary, it can be subjective, however numbers are not subjective. It's widely known LLMs are terrible at even basic maths. Even Google's own AI summary admits it which I was surprised at, marketing won't be happy. Yes, it is true that LLMs are often bad at math because they don't "understand" it as a logical system but rather process it as text, relying on pattern recognition from their training data.
- extr 1y agoSeems like you're very confused about what this work typically entails. The job of these employees is not mental arithmatic. It's closer to: - Log in to the internal system that handles customer policies - Find all policies that were bound in the last 30 days - Log in to the internal system that manages customer payments - Verify that for all policies bound, there exists a corresponding payment that roughly matches the premium. - Flag any divergences above X% for accounting/finance to follow up on. Practically this involves munging a few CSVs, maybe typing in a few things, setting up some XLOOKUPs, IF formulas, conditional formatting, etc. Will AI replace the entire job? No...but that's not the goal. Does it have to be perfect? Also no...the existing employees performing this work are also not perfect, and in fact sometimes their accuracy is quite poor.
- martinald 1y agoThis is going to be massive if it works as well as I suspect it might. I think many software engineers overlook how many companies have huge (billion dollar) processes run through Excel. It's much less about 'greenfield' new excel sheets and much more about fixing/improving existing ones. If it works as well as Claude Code works for code, then it will get pretty crazy adoption I suspect (unless Microsoft beats them to it).
- thewebguyd 1y ago> This is going to be massive if it works as well as I suspect it might. Until Microsoft does its anti-competitive thing and find a way to break this in the file format, because this is exactly what copilot in excel does. That said, Copilot in Excel is pretty much hot garbage still so anything will be better than that.
- NotMichaelBay 1y agoWhat do you mean, what is copilot in excel doing exactly?
- lm28469 1y ago> I think many software engineers overlook how many companies have huge (billion dollar) processes run through Excel. So they can fire the two dudes that take care of it, lose 15 years of in house knowledge to save 200k a year and cry in a few months when their magic tool shits the bed ? Massive win indeed
- bsenftner 1y agoIf the company is half baked, those "two dudes" will become indispensable beyond belief. They are the ones that understand how Excel works far deeper, and paired with Claude for Excel they become far far more valuable.
- Balgair 1y agoAt my org it more that these AI tools finally allow the employees to get through things at all. The deadlines are getting met for the first time, maybe ever. We can at last get to the projects that will make the company money instead of chasing ghosts from 2021. The burn down charts are warm now.
- warthog 1y agoTough day to be an AI Excel add-in startup
- jonathanstrange 1y agoThat 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 1y agoActually just wrote about this: https://aimode.substack.com/p/openai-is-below-above-and-around?r=1yhy9o 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 1y agoits a great time for your ai excel add-in to start getting acquired by a claude competitor though
- NotMichaelBay 1y agoNot OpenAI, though, because they already gave $14M to an AI Excel add-in startup (Endex)
- mitjam 1y agoAsk Rosie is actually shutting down right now: https://www.askrosie.ai/ 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.
- intended 1y agoAs 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.
- garyclarke27 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoFor 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.
- mattas 1y agoI'm not excited about having LLMs generate spreadsheets or formulas. But, I think LLMs could be particularly useful in helping me find inconsistent formulas or errors that are challenging to identify. Especially in larger, complex spreadsheets touched by multiple people over the course of months.
- thesuitonym 1y agoFor once in my life, I actually had a delightful interaction with an LLM last week. I was changing some text in an Excel sheet in a very progromatic way that could have easily been done with the regex functions in Excel. But I'm not really great with regex, and it was only 15 or so cells, so I was content to just do it manually. After three or four cells, Copilot figured out what I was doing and suggested the rest of the changes for me. This is what I want AI to do, not generate wrong answers and hallucinate girlfriends.
- klausnrooster 1y agoThanks for reminding me to check if the REGEXEXTRACT, REGEXREPLACE, and REGEXTEST functions had landed for me yet. They have! Good, because sometime in 2027 the library providing RegEx in VBA will be yanked. https://youtu.be/pGH9LdgkJio https://youtu.be/pGH9LdgkJio
- bambax 1y agoOne approach is to produce read-only data in BI tools: users are free to export anything they want and make their own spreadsheets, but those are for their own use only. Reference data is produced every day by a central, controlled process and cannot in any circumstance be modified by the end user. I have implemented this a couple of times and not only does it work well, it tends to be fairly well accepted. People need spreadsheets to work on them, but generally they kind of hate sending those around via email. Having a reference source of data is welcomed.
- gedy 1y agoCool 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)"
- racl101 1y agoThis could be huge! Very exciting!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tanksterzen 1y ago[flagged]
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoFresh account spam on my HN? Buy an ad somewhere. Aaaaand it's gone!
- thesuitonym 1y agoLearn > Documentation is just a single markdown doc?
- Aboutplants 1y agoI’ve got some bad news about the prospects of your startup
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- michaelmarkell 1y agoIMO, 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.
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoSo more or less like what AI has been doing for the last couple of years when it comes to writing code?
- dcre 1y agoThat's exactly what they're doing. https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financial-services https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...
- levocardia 1y ago"This won't work because (something obvious that engineers at Anthropic clearly thought of already)"
- michaelmarkell 1y agoNot 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
- pdyc 1y agoI 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 1y agoWhy second thoughts?
- pdyc 1y agoeveryone will use claude if they support it why would they use my product. so i will have to find some other angle to differentiate.
- causal 1y agoSeems everyone is speculating features instead of just reading TFA which does in fact list features: - 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. - Test scenarios without breaking formulas: Update assumptions across your entire model while preserving all dependencies. Test different scenarios quickly—Claude highlights every change with explanations for full transparency. - Debug and fix errors: Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference errors to their source in seconds. Claude explains what went wrong and how to fix it without disrupting the rest of your model. - Build models or fill existing templates: Create draft financial models from scratch based on your requirements. Or populate existing templates with fresh data while maintaining all formulas and structure.
- Balgair 1y agoIf this can reliably deal with the REF, VALUE, and NA problems, it'll be worth it for that alone. Oh and deal with dates before 1900. Excel is a gift from God if you stay in its lane. If you ever so slightly deviate, not even the Devil can help you. But maybe, juuuuust maybe, AI can?
- libraryatnight 1y ago"not even Devil can help you. But maybe, juuuuust maybe, AI can?" Bold assumption that the devil and AI aren't aligned ;)
- lavishlibra0810 1y agoThe greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist
- ACCount37 1y agoNah, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Machine Learning is a legitimate field of study, and not just thinly veiled demon summoning.
- serf 1y agoAnthropic is in a weird place for me right now. They're growing fast , creating little projects that i'd love to try, but their customer service was so bad for me as a max subscriber that I set an ethical boundary for myself to avoid their services until such point that it appears that they care about their customers whatsoever. I keep searching for a sign, but everyone I talk to has horror stories. It sucks as a technologist that just wants to play with the thing; oh well.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoBest way to think of it is this: Right now you are not the customer. Investors are. The money people pay in monthly fees to Anthropic for even the top Max sub likely doesn't come closer to covering the energy & infrastructure costs for running the system. You can prove this to yourself by just trying to cost out what it takes to build the hardware capable of running a model of this size at this speed and running it locally. It's tens of thousands of dollars just to build the hardware, not even considering the energy bills. So I imagine the goal right now is to pull in a mass audience and prove the model, to get people hooked, to get management and talent at software firms pushing these tools. And I guess there's some in management and the investment community that thinks this will come with huge labour cost reductions but I think they may be dreaming. ... And then.. I guess... jack the price up? Or wait for Moore's Law? So it's not a surprise to me they're not jumping to try and service individual subscribers who are paying probably a fraction of what it costs them to the run the service. I dunno, I got sick of paying the price for Max and I now use the Claude Code tool but redirect it to DeepSeek's API and use their (inferior but still tolerable) model via API. It's probably 1/4 the cost for about 3/4 the product. It's actually amazing how much of the intelligence is built into the tool itself instead of just the model. It's often incredibly hard to tell the difference bertween DeepSeek output and what I got from Sonnet 4 or Sonnet 4.5
- kridsdale1 1y agoYou are bang on. Every AI company right now (except Google Meta and Microsoft) has their valuations based on the expectation of a future monopoly on AGI. None of their business models today or in the foreseeable horizon are even positive let alone world-dominating. The continued funding rounds are all apparently based on expectation of becoming the sole player. The continuing advancement of open source / open weights models keeps me from being a believer. I’ve placed my bet and feel secure where it is.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoHope it’s better than what MS is currently shipping as AI. Everything I try to do something, the response is “sorry, I can’t do this”.
- smithkl42 1y agoCopilot is getting better - I'm getting fewer of those than I used to - but it's still significantly more stupid than other agents, even when in theory it's using the same model.
- throawayonthe 1y agoR.I.P. global economy
- fudged71 1y agoInteresting their X post mentions "pre-built Agent Skills" but it's not on the webpage. I wonder if they will give you the ability to edit/add/delete Skills, that would be phenomenal. Edit: found it on their other blog post https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financial-services https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...
- Havoc 1y agoThey can try, but doubt anyone serious will adopt it. Tried integrating chatgpt into my finance job to see how far I can get. Mega jikes...millions of dollars of hallucinated mistakes. Worse you don't have the same tight feedback loop you've got in programming that'll tell you when something is wrong. Compile errors, unit tests etc. You basically need to walk through everything it did to figure out what's real and what's hallucinations. Basically fails silently. If they roll that out at scale in the financial system...interesting times ahead. Still presumably there is something around spreadsheets it'll be able to do - the spreadsheet equivalent of boilerplate code whatever that may be
- AppleBananaPie 1y agoI'm bad with spread sheets so maybe this is trivial but having an llm tell me how to connect my sheet to whatever data I'm using at the moment and it coming up with a link or sql query or both has allowed me to quickly pull in data where I'd normally eyeball it and move on or worst case do it partially manually if really important. It's like one off scripts in a sense? I'm not doing complex formulas I just need to know how I can pull data into a sheet and then I'll bucketize or graph it myself. Again probably because I'm not the most adept user but it has definitely been a positive use case for me. I suspect my use case is pretty boilerplatey :)
- Havoc 1y agoGood to know that it works well for that. >I'm not doing complex formulas Neither am I frankly. Finance stuff can get conceptually complicated even with simple addition & multiplication though. e.g. I deal with a lot of offshore stuff, so the average spreadsheet is a mix of currencies, jurisdictions and companies that are interlinked. I could probably talk you through it high level in an hour with a pen & paper, but the LLMs just can't see the forest for all the trees in the raw sheet.
- Culonavirus 1y agoAI slop eaters will still eat it up and ask for seconds. Pigs in oats seeing dollar signs.
- humanfromearth9 1y agoThis could be invaluable for reverse engineering complex workbooks with multiple data sources and hundreds or thousands of formulas.
- pumnikol 1y agoIf it has a concept of data sources and can digest them, sure. Anecdotally, most issues with Excel at my job are caused by data sources being renamed, moved or reformatted, by broken logins, or by insufficient access rights.
- keernan 1y agoIf 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.
- travisgriggs 1y agoAs 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-psoWdSpo Curious, if others see the connection. :D
- davidpolberger 1y agoI'm a co-founder of Calcapp, an app builder for formula-driven apps using Excel-like formulas. I spent a couple of days using Claude Code to build 20 new templates for us, and I was blown away. It was able to one-shot most apps, generating competent, intricate apps from having looked at a sample JSON file I put together. I briefly told it about extensions we had made to Excel functions (including lambdas for FILTER, named sort type enums for XMATCH, etc), and it picked those up immediately. At one point, it generated a verbose formula and mentioned, off-handedly, that it would have been prettier had Calcapp supported LET. "It does!", I replied, "and as an extension, you can use := instead of , to separate names and values!") and it promptly rewrote it using our extended syntax, producing a sleek formula. These templates were for various verticals, like real estate, financial planning and retail, and I would have been hard-pressed to produce them without Claude's domain knowledge. And I did it in a weekend! Well, "we" did it in a weekend. So this development doesn't really surprise me. I'm sure that Claude will be right at home in Excel, and I have already thought about how great it would be if Claude Code found a permanent home in our app designer. I'm concerned about the cost, though, so I'm holding off for now. But it does seem unfair that I get to use Claude to write apps with Calcapp, while our customers don't get that privilege. (I wrote more about integrating Claude Code here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662229)
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- unshavedyak 1y agoDumb 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 1y agoModern 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.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoHow is this different from the existing Claude skill, that uses a prompt and pandas to edit an Excel file? https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/document-skills/xlsx/SKILL.md https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/document-skil...
- shooker435 1y agoThis isn't built for Excel users who use Github and Claude Skills, it's built for Excel users who would run away from Git commands.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoThe Claude skill I linked to is built into the Claude desktop client. You just attach an Excel file to your chat and ask away. I linked to the skill prompt just to more clearly explain the approach that's currently available to all Claude users. It requires zero familiarity with git or command line.
- mamonster 1y agoOn 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.
- grim_io 1y agoIf 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.
- surume 1y agoCheckmate, Altman
- mainecoder 1y agoYeah 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.
- kaspermarstal 1y agoSo cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel. Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come from the ability to use AI _as_ a formula. For example, =PROMPT("Classify user feedback as positive, neutral or negative", A1). This would enable normal people (non-programmers) to fire off thousands of prompts at once and automate workflows like programmers do (disclaimer: I am the author of Cellm that does exactly this). Combined with Excel's built-in functions for deterministic work, Claude could really kill the whole copy-pasting data in and out of chat windows for bulk-processing data.
- starik36 1y agoI can't wait until someone does this, then autofills 50k rows down, then gets a $50k bill for all the tokens. Reminds me of when our CIO insisted on moving to the cloud (back when AWS was just getting started) and then was super pissed when he got a $60k bill because no one knew to shutdown their VMs when leaving for the day.
- kaspermarstal 1y agoIf someone is processing 50k rows, that means they found real value and the UX is working. That's the whole point. Also, 50k rows wouldn't cost $50k. More like $100 with Sonnet 4.5 pricing and typical numbers of input/output tokens. Imagine the time needed to go through 50k rows manually and math doesn't really work for a horror story.
- NotMichaelBay 1y agoYou may already be aware but Microsoft recently released a COPILOT() function that does this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-5849821b-755d-4030-a38b-9e20be0cbf62 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-...
- kaspermarstal 1y agoThanks, appreciate it. Indeed, and Anthropic did something similar for Google sheets a year ago. I am dying to know why they decided this should not be part of their excel effort. They obviously put a lot of work and thought into claude for excel so it must be intentional. Anyone from Anthropic here that would like elaborate?
- btown 1y agoFrom the signup form mentioning Private Equity / Venture Capital, Hedge Fund, Investment Banking... this seems squarely aimed at financial modeling. Which is really, really cool. I've worked alongside sell-side investment bankers in a prior startup, and so much of the work is in taking a messy set of statements from a company, understanding the underlying assumptions, and building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding, 3-statement models that not only adhere to standard conventions (perhaps best introed by https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/build-integrated-3-statement-financial-model/ https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/build-integrated-3-... ) but also are highly customized for different assumptions that can range from seasonality to sensitivity to creative deal structures. It is quite common for people to pull many, many all-nighters to try to tweak these models in response to a senior banker or a client having an idea! And one might argue there are way too many similar-looking numbers to keep a human banker from "hallucinating," much less an LLM. But fundamentally, a 3-statement model and all its build-sheets are a dependency graph with loosely connected human-readable labels, and that means you can write tools that let an LLM crawl that dependency graph in a reliable and semantically meaningful way. And that lets you build really cool things, really fast. I'm of the opinion that giving small companies the ability to present their finances to investors, the same way Fortune 500 companies hire armies of bankers to do, is vital to a healthy economy, and to giving Main Street the best possible chance to succeed and grow. This is a massive step in the right direction.
- JonChesterfield 1y agoPresenting your finances to investors via a tool designed for generation of plausible looking data is fraud.
- ceh123 1y agoPresenting false data to investors is fraud, doesn't matter how it was generated. In fact, humans are quite good at "generating plausible looking data", doesn't mean human generated spreadsheets are fraud. On the other hand, presenting truthful data to investors is distinctly not fraud, and this again does not depend on the generation method.
- ed_elliott_asc 1y agoI use excel but not for financial modelling, I’ll use it
- JonChesterfield 1y agoThe thing really missing from multi-megabyte excel sheets of business critical carnage was a non-deterministic rewrite tool. It'll interact excitingly with the industry standard of no automated testing whatsoever. I 100% believe generative AI can change a spreadsheet. Turn the xslx into text, mutate that, turn it back into an xslx, throw it away if it didn't parse at all. The result will look pretty similar to the original too, since spreadsheets are great at showing immediately local context and nothing else. Also, we've done a pretty good job of training people that chatgpt works great, so there's good reason for them to expect claude for excel to work great too. I'd really like the results of this to be considered negligence with non-survivable fines for the reckless stupidity, but more likely, it'll be seen as an act of god. Like all the other broken shit in the IT world.
- patife 1y agoFodasse a Rows é pelo menos 3x melhor
- supermalvo 1y ago100%
- gwbas1c 1y agoI wonder if this will be more/less useful than what we have with AI in software development. There's a lot less to understand than a whole codebase. I don't do spreadsheets very often, but I can emphasize with tracking down "Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference errors to their source in seconds." I once hit something like that, and I found it a lot harder to trace a typical compiler error.
- wonderwonder 1y agoBeen 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
- NumberCruncher 1y agoOn 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.
- lionkor 1y agoThere'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".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- teddyh 1y ago“Copilot in Excel is a global financial crisis waiting to happen.” — Zack Korman, <https://x.com/ZackKorman/status/1974828240679166396 https://x.com/ZackKorman/status/1974828240679166396>
- ada1981 1y agoCan we get it in Sheets?
- frankacter 1y agofor sheets, Gemini exists already natively. Alternatively, Perplexity Comet browser (or OpenAI Atlas) would presumably provide sidebar functionality to act within your spreadsheets.
- ada1981 11mo agoI would really like Claude in there.
- alex43578 1y agoOn 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.
- santadays 1y agoDon'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 1y agoSheets also has an `AI` formula now that you can use to invoke Gemini models directly.
- santadays 1y agoWhen 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.
- sexy_seedbox 1y agoCellm + Ollamma? https://docs.getcellm.com/models/local-models https://docs.getcellm.com/models/local-models
- 1y ago
- dosnem 1y agoAnyone 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?
- bonsai_spool 1y ago> 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 https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills
- brookst 1y agoLLMs 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 |
- flowingfocus 1y agoVersion control and meaningful diffs for .xlsx will be in high demand in a few months
- andyferris 1y agoHonestly those things are well past due - if this tips the scales then I hope we can all benefit.
- jprd 1y agoIf Claude is going to work on the underpinning technology of every business in the Capitalist world, We should let Claude loose on the COBOL code out there too, I can't imagine anything going wrong.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- StarterPro 1y agoHA! 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.
- voidmain0001 1y agoFrom 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 1y agoLast 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 1y agoI 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
- xouse 1y agoI’m decent at excel, but not amazing. I’ve tried again and again to use LLMs including Claude to solve specific, small, well defined problems in excel with a 0% success rate. My experience so far has been if I can’t do it LLMs can’t either. If LLMs are a 6/10 right now at basic coding then they’re a 3/10 at excel from my experience.
- NotMichaelBay 1y agoWhat kinds of problems in Excel are you trying to solve? Just curious as I'm also building an AI Excel addin, as a side project. :)
- klausnrooster 1y agoI'd like to see it compete in the Financial Modeling World Cup, say in Las Vegas this December. https://excel-esports.com https://excel-esports.com
- sherinjosephroy 1y ago[flagged]
- user3939382 1y agoAnthropic knows almost nothing about their own products and you guys know even less.
- anshulbhide 1y agoJust 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 1y agohttps://chatgpt.com/share/69005eec-6ee0-8009-a8d3-ebb1c30e720d 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.
- scrappyjoe 1y agoMaybe this is how we get code versioning for Excel. Git LFS for workbook + the following prompt : “Create a commit explains what has changed in the workbook since the last commit. Be brief, but explain the change in business terms as well as code change terms.”
- matthewfelgate 1y agoI tried https://sanand0.github.io/llmexcel/#/ 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?
- bugsense 1y agoThat’s it. 1T EV added.
- d4rkp4ttern 1y agoWeird to see so much discussion when it’s still behind a waitlist. And it seems aimed at “enterprise” only
- theshrike79 1y agoThe best thing that can come from this is unit tests for Excel. LLMs work best when they can call tools (edit the sheet) and test their results in a loop. It's like the "value seek" thing Excel has had since forever; "adjust these values until this cell is X" Excel doesn't have any way to verify that every formula in that 60k line sheet is correct and someone hasn't accidentally replaced one with a static number for example.
- filearts 1y agoIn a previous professional life, I did financial modelling for a big 4 accounting firm. We had tooling that allowed us to visualize contiguous ranges of identical formulas (if you convert formulas to R1C1 addressing, similar formulas have the same representation). This allowed for overrides to stick out like a sore thumb. I suspect similar tools could be made for Claude and other LLMs except that it wouldn't be plagued by the mind-numbing tedium of doing this sort of audit.
- hufdr 1y agoAI 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.
- muddi900 1y agoBut how fast will we run out of usage limits?
- dekerklas 11mo ago[dead]