AI in Excel and PowerPoint

Anthropic has launched official Claude extensions for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint and made them available on the Microsoft Marketplace.

This time, it is not an external assistant where you copy and paste or ask for an Excel or PowerPoint export. It is a tool integrated into the applications' own sidebars, where you can request information and changes in natural language, which Claude carries out in real time inside the open file.

Open Excel, activate the add-in and you have a chat in the sidebar. Ask it to create a pivot table, fix formulas with errors or reorganise data, and Claude makes the changes directly in the spreadsheet, highlighting each cell it changed and explaining the result.

It works the same way in PowerPoint: select a slide, describe what you want to change and it edits the slide while respecting the active template, including fonts, colours and layouts.

The most useful part is the connection between the two applications. You can be analysing data in Excel and directly ask it to build a presentation based on those results, without repeating the context or switching windows. The conversation continues across both tools.

For teams, there is also an option to save repeatable workflows, such as proposal and report templates, customer presentation structures and legal documents, among others. Set it up once and anyone can run it with a click.

Installation takes two minutes through the Microsoft Marketplace: just search for “Claude by Anthropic”.

Give it a try.