Claude understands your entire workbook—from nested formulas to multiple tab dependencies.
Claude for Excel is currently in beta as a research preview, so it’s best for model analysis, assumption updates, error debugging, template population, formula explanations, multi-tab navigation. 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.
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What 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.
By Scubabear68 2025-10-2720:3311 reply Having wrangled many spreadsheets personally, and worked with CFOs who use them to run small-ish businesses, and all the way up to one of top 3 brokerage houses world-wide using them to model complex fixed income instruments... this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Spreadsheet UI is already a nightmare. The formula editing and relationship visioning is not there at all. Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets, even my own carefully curated ones.
Claude is not going to improve this. It is going to make it far, far worse with subtle and not so subtle hallucinations happening left and right.
The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or emulating someone's voice.
It is not a basis for getting correct spreadsheets that show what you want to show. I don't want my spreadsheet correctness to start from a random seed. I want it to spring from first principles.
By jbs789 2025-10-280:15 I tend to agree that dropping the tool as it is into untrained hands is going to be catastrophic.
I’ve had similar professional experiences as you and have been experimenting with Claude Code. I’ve found I really need to know what I’m doing and the detail in order to make effective (safe) use out of it. And that’s been a learning curve.
The one area I hope/think it’s closest to (given comments above) is potentially as a “checker” or validator.
But even then I’d consider the extent to which it leaks data, steers me the wrong way, or misses something.
The other case may be mocking up a simple financial model for a test / to bounce ideas around. But without very detailed manual review (as a mitigating check), I wouldn’t trust it.
So yeah… that’s the experience of someone who maybe bridges these worlds somewhat… And I think many out there see the tough (detailed) road ahead, while these companies are racing to monetize.
I don't think tools like Claude are there yet, but I already trust GPT-5 Pro to be more diligent about catching bugs in software than me, even when I am trying to be very careful. I expect even just using these tools to help review existing Excel spreadsheets could lead to a significant boost in quality if software is any guide (and Excel spreadsheets seem even worse than software when it comes to errors).
That said, Claude is still quite behind GPT-5 in its ability to review code, and so I'm not sure how much to expect from Sonnet 4.5 in this new domain. OpenAI could probably do better.
> That said, Claude is still quite behind GPT-5 in its ability to review code, and so I'm not sure how much to expect from Sonnet 4.5 in this new domain. OpenAI could probably do better.
It’s always interesting to see others opinions as it’s still so variable and “vibe” based. Personally, for my use, the idea that any GPT-5 model is superior to Claude just doesn’t resonate - and I use both regularly for similar tasks.
By sothatsit 2025-10-2723:59 I also find the subjective nature of these models interesting, but in this case the difference in my experiences between Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 Codex, and especially GPT-5 Pro, for code review is pretty stark. This is also not just vibes, GPT-5 consistently beats Claude models on reasoning benchmarks, often by a wide margin, and I would definitely categorise code review as a complex reasoning task (at least when looking for non-trivial bugs).
I have had GPT-5 point out dozens of complex bugs to me. Often in these cases I will try to see if other models can spot the same problems, and Gemini has occasionally but the Claude models never have (using Opus 4, 4.1, and Sonnet 4.5). Not once, which continues to surprise me. They can still be good at pointing out trivial bugs like typos, mismatching error messages, or really obvious bugs though.
If you haven’t tried it, I would try the codex /review feature and compare its results to asking Sonnet to do a review. For me, the difference is very clear for code review. For actual coding tasks, both models are much more varied, but for code review I’ve never had an instance where Claude pointed out a bug that GPT-5 missed. And I use these tools for code review all the time.
My first job out of uni was building a spreadsheet infra as code version control system after a Windows update made an eight year old spreadsheet go haywire and lose $10m in a afternoon.
Spreadsheets are already a disaster.
By p4ul 2025-10-2723:26 It's interesting that you mention disaster; there is at least one annual conference dedicated to "spreadsheet risk management".[1]
By sally_glance 2025-10-2722:59 Compared to what? Granted, Excel incidents are probably underreported and might produce "silent" consequential losses. But compared to that, for enterprise or custom software in general we have pretty scary estimates of the damages. Like Y2K (between 300-600bn) and the UK Postal Office thing (~1bn).
By daveguy 2025-10-2721:31 > Spreadsheets are already a disaster.
Yeah, that's what OP said. Now add a bunch of random hallucinations hidden inside formulas inside cells.
If they really have a good spreadsheet solution they've either fixed the spreadsheet UI issues or the LLM hallucination issues or both. My guess is neither.
By sally_glance 2025-10-2722:31 Having AI create the spreadsheet you want is totally possible, just like generating bash scripts works well. But to get good results, there needs to be some documentation describing all the hidden relationships and nasty workarounds first.
Don't try to make LLMs generate results or numbers, that's bound to fail in any case. But they're okay to generate a starting point for automations (like Excel sheets with lots of formulas and macros), given they get access to the same context we have in our heads.
By hoistbypetard 2025-10-2723:44 IMO people tend to over-trust both AI and Excel. Maybe this will recalibrate that after it leads to a catastrophic business failure or two.
> all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity
Those are tuneable parameters. Turn down the temperature and top_p if you don't want the creativity.
> Claude is not going to improve this.
We can measure models vs humans and figure this out.
To your own point, humans already make "rampant" mistakes. With models, we can scale inference time compute to catch and eliminate mistakes, for example: run 6x independent validators using different methodologies.
One-shot financial models are a bad idea, but properly designed systems can probably match or beat humans pretty quickly.
By th0ma5 2025-10-2722:04 > Turn down the temperature and top_p if you don't want the creativity.
This also reduces accuracy in real terms. The randomness is used to jump out of local minima.
Is this just a feeling you have or is this downstream of actual use cases you've applied AI to observed and measured reliability on?
Not the parent poster, but this is pretty much the foundation of LLMs. They are by their nature probabilistic, not deterministic. This is precisely what the parent is referring to.
By extr 2025-10-2723:14 All processes in reality, everywhere, are probablistic. The entire reason "engineering" is not the same as theoretical mathematics is about managing these probabilities to an acceptable level for the task you're trying to perform. You are getting a "probablistic" output from a human too. Human beings are not guaranteeing theoretically optimal excel output when they send their boss Final_Final_v2.xlsx. You are using your mental model of their capabilities to inform how much you trust the result.
Building a process to get a similar confidence in LLM output is part of the game.
Not OP but using LLMs in any professional setting, like programming, editing or writing technical specifications, OP is correct.
Without extensive promoting and injectimg my own knowledge and experience, LLMs generate absolute unusable garbage (on average). Anyone who disagrees very likely is not someone who would produce good quality work by themselves (on average). That's not a clever quip; that's a very sad reality. SO MANY people cannot be bothered to learn anything if they can help it.
By visarga 2025-10-2723:04 The triad of LLM dependencies in my view: initiation of tasks, experience based feedback, and consequence sink. They can do none of these, they all connect to the outer context which sits with the user, not the model.
You know what? This is also not unlike hiring a human, they need the hirer party tell them what to do, give feedback, and assume the outcomes.
It's all about context which is non-fungible and distributed, not related to intelligence but to the reason we need intelligence for.
I would completely disagree. I use LLMs daily for coding. They are quite far from AGI and it does not appear they are replacing Senior or Staff Engineers any time soon. But they are incredible machines that are perfectly capable of performing some economically valuable tasks in a fraction of the time it would have taken a human. If you deny this your head is in the sand.
Capable, yeah, but not reliable, that's my point. They can one shot fantastic code, or they can one shot the code I then have to review and pull my hair out over for a week, because it's such crap (and the person who pushed it is my boss, for example, so I can't just tell him to try again).
That's not consistent.
By chrisweekly 2025-10-2723:26 Why do you frame the options as "one shot... or... one shot"?
By extr 2025-10-2723:13 Have you never used one to hunt down an obscure bug and found the answer quicker than you likely would have yourself?
By wahnfrieden 2025-10-2721:531 reply You can ask your boss to submit PRs using Codex’s “try 5 variations of the same task and select the one you like most though
By zxor 2025-10-2723:12 Surely at that point they could write the code themselves faster than they can review 5 PRs.
Producing more slop for someone else to work through is not the solution you think it is.
By mountainriver 2025-10-2722:36 You can do it cursor style
By MattGaiser 2025-10-2721:122 reply > Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets
To me, the case for LLMs is strongest not because LLMs are so unusually accurate and awesome, but because if human performance were put on trial in aggregate, it would be found wanting.
Humans already do a mediocre job of spreadsheets, so I don't think it is a given that Claude will make more mistakes than humans do.
By nosianu 2025-10-2723:06 Okay, and now you give those mediocre humans a tool hat is both great and terrible. The problem is, unless you know your way around very well, they won't know which is which.
Since my company uses Excel a lot, and I know the basics but don't want to become an expert, I use LLMs to ask intermediate questions, too hard to answer with the few formulas I know, not too hard for a short solution path.
I have great success and definitely like what I can get with the Excel/LLM combo. But if my colleagues used it the same way, they would not get my good results, which is not their fault, they are not IT but specialists, e.g. for logistics. The best use of LLMs is if you could already do the job without them, but it saves you time to ask them and then check if the result is actually acceptable.
Sometimes I abandon the LLM session, because sometimes, and it's not always easy to predict, fixing the broken result would take more effort than just doing it the old way myself.
A big problem is that the LLMs are so darn confident and always present a result. For example, I point it to a problem, it "thinks", and then it gives me new code and very confidently summarizes what the problem was, correctly, that it now for sure fixed the problem. Only that when I actually try the result has gotten worse than before. At that point I never try to get back to a working solution by continuing to try to "talk" to the AI, I just delete that session and do another, non-AI approach.
But non-experts, and people who are very busy and just want to get some result to forward to someone waiting for it as quickly as possible will be tempted to accept the nice looking and confidently presented "solution" as-is. And you may not find a problem until half a year later somebody finds that prepayments, pro forma bills and the final invoices don't quite match in hard to follow ways.
Not that these things don't happen now already, but adding a tool with erratic results might increase problems, depending on actual implementation of the process. Which most likely won't be well thought out, many will just cram in the new tool and think it works when it doesn't implode right away, and the first results, produced when people still pay a lot of attention and are careful, all look good.
I am in awe of the accomplishments of this new tool, but it is way overhyped IMHO, still far too unpolished and random. Forcing all kinds of processes and people to use it is not a good match, I think.
By lionkor 2025-10-2721:28 But isn't this only fine as long someone who knows what they are doing has oversight and can fix issues when they arise and Claude gets stuck?
Once we all forget how to write SUM(A:A), will we just invent a new kind of spreadsheet once Claude gets stuck?
Or in other words; what's the end game here? LLMs clearly cannot be left alone to do anything properly, so what's the end game of making people not learn anything anymore?
By scoot 2025-10-2721:40 Or you could, you know, read the article before commenting to see the limited scope of this integration?
Anyway, Google has already integrated Gemini into Sheets, and recently added direct spreadsheet editing capability so your comment was disproven before you even wrote it
By silenced_trope 2025-10-2721:40 > The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or emulating someone's voice.
I think you need to turn down the temperature a little bit. This could be a beneficial change.
By meesles 2025-10-280:21 My theory: a lot of software we build is the supposed solve for a 'crappy spreadsheet'. a) that isnt' much of a moat, b) you're watching generalization of software happen in real time.
I 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.
Seems 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.
> “Does it have to be perfect?”
Actually, yes. This kind of management reporting is either (1) going to end up in the books and records of the company - big trouble if things have to be restated in the future or (2) support important decisions by leadership — who will be very much less than happy if analysis turns out to have been wrong.
A lot of what ties up the time of business analysts is ticking and tying everything to ensure that mistakes are not made and that analytics and interpretations are consistent from one period to the next. The math and queries are simple - the details and correctness are hard.
By jacksnipe 2025-10-2722:03 Is this not belligerently ignoring the fact that this work is already done imperfectly? I can’t tell you how many serious errors I’ve caught in just a short time of automating the generation of complex spreadsheets from financial data. All of them had already been checked by multiple analysts, and all of them contained serious errors (in different places!)
Speak for yourself and your own use cases. There are a huge diversity of workflows with which to apply automation in any medium to large business. They all have differing needs. Many excel workflows I'm personally familiar with already incoporate a "human review" step. Telling a business leader that they can now jump straight to that step, even if it requires 2x human review, with AI doing all of the most tediuous and low-stakes prework, is a clear win.
By Revanche1367 2025-10-2722:001 reply >Speak for yourself and your own use cases
Take your own advice.
By extr 2025-10-2723:19 I'm taking a much weaker position than the respondent: LLMs are useful for many classes of problem that do not require zero shot perfect accuracy. They are useful in contexts where the cost of building scaffolding around them to get their accuracy to an acceptable level is less than the cost of hiring humans to do the same work to the same degree of accuracy.
This is basic business and engineering 101.
There is another aspect to this kind of activity.
Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a time period. Basically sitting on credits or debits to some accounts for a period of weeks. The tacit knowledge to know when to sit on a transaction and when to action it is generally not written down in formal terms.
I'm not sure how these shenanigans will translate into an ai driven system.
By iamacyborg 2025-10-2722:28 > Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a time period.
This worked famously well for Enron.
By AvAn12 2025-10-2720:54 That’s the kind of thing that can get a company into a lot of trouble with its auditors and shareholders. Not that I am offering accounting advice of course. And yeah, one can not “blame” and ai system or try to ai-wash any dodgy practices.
Checking someone elses spreadsheet is a fucking nightmare. If your company has extremely good standards it's less miserable because at least the formatting etc will be consistent...
The one thing LLMs should consistently do is ensure that formatting is correct. Which will help greatly in the checking process. But no, I generally don't trust them to do sensible things with basic formulation. Not a week ago GPT 5 got confused whether a plus or a minus was necessary in a basic question of "I'm 323 days old, when is my birthday?"
I think you have a misunderstanding of the types of things that LLMs are good at. Yes you're 100% right that they can't do math. Yet they're quite proficient at basic coding. Most Excel work is similar to basic coding so I think this is an area where they might actually be pretty well suited.
My concern would be more with how to check the work (ie, make sure that the formulas are correct and no columns are missed) because Excel hides all that. Unlike code, there's no easy way to generate the diff of a spreadsheet or rely on Git history. But that's different from the concerns that you have.
By mr_toad 2025-10-280:15 > Most Excel work is similar to basic coding
Excel is similar to coding in BASIC, a giant hairy ball of tangled wool.
By Wowfunhappy 2025-10-2721:03 > Yes you're 100% right that they can't do math.
The model ought to be calling out to some sort of tool to do the math—effectively writing code, which it can do. I'm surprised the major LLM frontends aren't always doing this by now.
By collingreen 2025-10-2718:271 reply I've built spreadsheet diff tools on Google sheets multiple times. As the needs grows I think we will see diffs and commits and review tools reach customers
By break_the_bank 2025-10-2719:371 reply hey Collin! I am working on an AI agent on Google Sheets, I am curious if any of your designs are out in the public. We are trying to re-think how diffs should look like and want to make something nicer than what we currently have, so curious.
By collingreen 2025-10-2722:50 Hi! Nothing public nor generic enough to be a good building block. I found myself often frustrated by the tools that came out of the box but I believe better apis could make this slightly easier to solve.
The UX of spreadsheet diffs is a hard one to solve because of how weird the calculation loops are and how complicated the relationship between fields might be.
I've never tried to solve this for a real end user before in a generic way - all my past work here was for internal ability to audit changes and rollback catastrophes. I took a lot of shortcuts by knowing which cells are input data vs various steps of calculations -- maybe part of your ux is being able to define that on a sheet by sheet basis? Then you could show how different data (same formulas) changed outputs or how different formulas (same data) did differently?
Spreadsheets are basically weird app platforms at this point so you might not be able to create a single experience that is both deep and generic. On the other hand maybe treating it as an app is the unlock? Get your AI to noodle on what the whole thing is for, then show diff between before and after stable states (after all calculation loops stabilize or are killed) side by side with actual diffs of actual formulas? I feel like Id want to see a diff as a live final spreadsheet and be able to click on changed cells and see up the chain of their calculations to the ancestors that were modified.
Fun problem that sounds extremely complicated. Good luck distilling it!
By mapt 2025-10-2721:05 So do it in basic code where numbering your line G53 instead of G$53 doesn't crash a mass transit network because somebody's algorithm forgot to order enough fuel this month.
By alfalfasprout 2025-10-2720:50 proficient != near-flawless.
> Most Excel work is similar to basic coding so I think this is an area where they might actually be pretty well suited.
This is a hot take. One I'm not sure many would agree with.
Maybe LLMs will enable a new type of work in spreadsheets. Just like in coding we have PR reviews, with an LLM it should be possible to do a spreadsheet review. Ask the LLM to try to understand the intent and point out places where the spreadsheet deviates from the intent. Also ask the LLM to narrate the spreadsheet so it can be understood.
That first condition "try to understand the intent" is where it could go wrong. Maybe it thinks the spreadsheet aligns with the intent, but it misunderstood the intent.
LLMs are a lossy validation, and while they work sometimes, when they fail they usually do so 'silently'.
By monkeydust 2025-10-2720:50 Maybe we need some kind of method, framework to develop intent. Most of things that go wrong in knowledge working are down to lack of common understanding of intent.
> The one thing LLMs should consistently do is ensure that formatting is correct.
In JavaScript (and I assume most other programming languages) this is the job of static analysis tools (like eslint, prettier, typescript, etc.). I’m not aware of any LLM based tools which performs static analysis with as good a results as the traditional tools. Is static analysis not a thing in the spreadsheet world? Are there the tools which do static analysis on spreadsheets subpar, or offer some disadvantage not seen in other programming languages? And if so, are LLMs any better?
By eric-burel 2025-10-2720:28 Just use a normal static analysis tool and shove the result to an LLM. I believe Anthropic properly figured that agents are the key, in addition to models, contrary to OpenAI that is run by a psycho that only believes in training the bigger model.
By szundi 2025-10-2718:06 [dead]
By dpoloncsak 2025-10-2718:462 reply Sysadmin of a small company. I get asked pretty often to help with a pivot table, vlookup, or just general excel functions (and smartsheet, these users LOVE smartsheet)
By toomuchtodo 2025-10-2718:57 Indeed, in a small enough org, the sysadmin/technologist becomes support of last resort for all the things.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-2719:07 > these users LOVE smartsheet
I hate smartsheet…
Excel or R. (Or more often, regex followed by pen and paper followed by more regex.)
Last time, I gave claude an invoice and asked it to change one item on it, it did so nicely and gave me the new invoice. Good thing I noticed it had also changed the bank account number..
The more complicated the spreadsheet and the more dependencies it has, the greater the room for error. These are probabilistic machines. You can use them, I use them all the time for different things, but you need to treat them like employees you can't even trust to copy a bank account number correctly.
By mikeyouse 2025-10-2718:16 We’ve tried to gently use them to automate some of our report generation and PDF->Invoice workflows and it’s a nightmare of silent changes and absence of logic.. basic things like specifically telling it “debits need to match credits” and “balance sheets need to balance” that are ignored.
By wholinator2 2025-10-2720:08 Yeah, asking llm to edit one specific thing in a large or complex document/ codebase is like those repeated "give me the exact same image" gifs. It's fundamentally a statistical model so the only thing we can be _certain_ of is that _it's not_. It might get the desired change 100% correct but it's only gonna get the entire document 99 5%
By onion2k 2025-10-2722:12 Something that Claude Sonnet does when you use it to code is write scripts to test whether or not something is working. If it does that for Excel (e.g. some form of verification) it should be fine.
Besides, using AI is an exercise in a "trust but verify" approach to getting work done. If you asked a junior to do the task you'd check their output. Same goes for AI.
By next_xibalba 2025-10-2720:12 The use cases for spreadsheets are much more diverse than that. In my experience, spreadsheets just as often used for calculation. Many of them do require high accuracy, rely on determinism, and necessitate the understanding of maths ranging from basic arithmetic to statistics and engineering formulas. Financial models, for example, must be built up from ground truth and need to always use the right formulas with the right inputs to generate meaningful outputs.
I have personally worked with spreadsheet based financial models that use 100k+ rows x dozens of columns and involve 1000s of formulas that transform those data into the desired outputs. There was very little tolerance for mistakes.
That said, humans, working in these use cases, make mistakes >0% of the time. The question I often have with the incorporation of AI into human workflows is, will we eventually come to accept a certain level of error from them in the way we do for humans?
By jay_kyburz 2025-10-2721:41 >Does it have to be perfect? Also no.
Yeah, but it could be perfect, why are there humans in the loop at all? That is all just math!
By mbreese 2025-10-2720:01 I don’t see the issue so much as the deterministic precision of an LLM, but the lack of observability of spreadsheets. Just looking at two different spreadsheets, it’s impossible to see what changes were made. It’s not like programming where you can run a `git diff` to see what changes an LLM agent made to a source code file. Or even a word processing document where the text changes are clear.
Spreadsheets work because the user sees the results of complex interconnected values and calculations. For the user, that complexity is hidden away and left in the background. The user just sees the results.
This would be a nightmare for most users to validate what changes an LLM made to a spreadsheet. There could be fundamental changes to a formula that could easily be hidden.
For me, that the concern with spreadsheets and LLMs - which is just as much a concern with spreadsheets themselves. Try collaborating with someone on a spreadsheet for modeling and you’ll know how frustrating it can be to try and figure out what changes were made.
By laweijfmvo 2025-10-2717:421 reply I don't trust humans to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet!
By baconbrand 2025-10-2717:463 reply Right, we shouldn’t use humans or LLMs. We should use regular deterministic computer programs.
For cases where that is not available, we should use a human and never an LLM.
By davidpolberger 2025-10-2720:081 reply I like to use Claude Code to write deterministic computer programs for me, which then perform the actual work. It saves a lot of time.
I had a big backlog of "nice to have scripts" I wanted to write for years, but couldn't find the time and energy for. A couple of months after I started using Claude Code, most of them exist.
By baconbrand 2025-10-2720:39 That’s great and the only legitimate use case here. I suspect Microsoft will not try to limit customers to just writing scripts and will instead allow and perhaps even encourage them to let the AI go ham on a bunch of raw data with no intermediary code that could be reviewed.
Just a suspicion.
By extr 2025-10-2717:51 "regular deterministic computer programs" - otherwise known as the SUM function in Microsoft Excel
By szundi 2025-10-2718:07 [dead]
Most real-world spreadsheets I've worked with were fragile and sloppy, not precise and deterministic. Programmers always get shocked when they realize how many important things are built on extremely messy spreadsheets, and that people simply accept it. They rather just spend human hours correcting discrepancies than trying to build something maintainable.
By bonoboTP 2025-10-2722:24 Usually this is very hard because the tasks and the job often subtly shifts in somewhat unpredictable and unforeseen ways and there is no neat clean abstraction that you can just implement as an application. Too hererogeneous, too messy, too many exceptions. If you develop some clean elegant solution, next week there will be something that your shiny app doesn't allow and they'd have to submit a feature request or whatever.
In Excel, it's possible to just ad hoc adjust things and make it up as you go. It's not clean but very adaptable and flexible.
By bg24 2025-10-2718:05 "I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work" => I think LLM is not doing the precise arithmetic. It is the agent with lots of knowledge (skills) and tools. Precise deterministic work is done by tools (deterministic code). Skills brings domain knowledge and how to sequence a task. Agent executes it. LLM predicts the next token.
By doug_durham 2025-10-2717:431 reply Sure, but this isn't requiring that the LLM do any math. The LLM is writing formulas and code to do the math. They are very good at that. And like any automated system you need to review the work.
By causal 2025-10-2718:16 Exactly, and if it can be done in a way that helps users better understand their own spreadsheets (which are often extremely complex codebases in a single file!) then this could be a huge use case for Claude.
Do you trust humans to be precise and deterministic, or even to be especially good at math?
This is talking about applying LLMs to formula creation and references, which they are actually pretty good at. Definitely not about replacing the spreadsheet's calculation engine.
By amrocha 2025-10-2723:00 I trust humans to not be able to shoot the company on the foot without even realizing it.
Why are we suddenly ok with giving every underpaid and exploited employee a foot gun and expect them to be responsible with it???
By game_the0ry 2025-10-2720:27 > I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet.
I was thinking along the same lines, but I could not articulate as well as you did.
Spreadsheet work is deterministic; LLM output is probabilistic. The two should be distinguished.
Still, its a productivity boost, which is always good.
By onion2k 2025-10-2722:07 It's widely known LLMs are terrible at even basic maths.
Claude for Excel isn't doing maths. It's doing Excel. If the llm is bad at maths then teaching it to use a tool that's good at maths seems sensible.
By chpatrick 2025-10-2719:11 They're not great at arithmetic but at abstract mathematics and numerical coding they're pretty good actually.
By sdeframond 2025-10-2719:57 > I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet.
Rightly so! But LLMs can still make you faster. Just don't expect too much from it.
By MangoCoffee 2025-10-2721:111 reply LLMs are just a tool, though. Humans still have to verify them, like with very other tools out there
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-10-2721:13 Eh, yes. In theory. In practice, and this is what I have experienced personally, bosses seem to think that you now have interns so you should be able to do 5x the output.. guess what that means. No verification or rubber stamp.
By mhh__ 2025-10-2719:39 If LLMs can replace mathematica for me when I'm doing affine yield curve calculations they can do a DCF for some banker idiots
By informal007 2025-10-2720:18 you might trust when the precision is extremely high and others agree with that.
high precision is possible because they can realize that by multiple cross validations
By prisonguard 2025-10-2720:24 ChatGPT is actively being used as a calculator.
>I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work
not just in a spreadsheet, any kind of deterministic work at all.
find me a reliable way around this. i don't think there is one. mcp/functions are a band aid and not consistent enough when precision is important.
after almost three years of using LLMs, i have not found a single case where i didn't have to review its output, which takes as long or longer than doing it by hand.
ML/AI is not my domain, so my knowledge is not deep nor technical. this is just my experience. do we need a new architecture to solve these problems?
By baconbrand 2025-10-2719:31 ML/AI is not my domain but you don’t have to get all that technical to understand that LLMs run on probability. We need a new architecture to solve these problems.
I couldn’t agree more. I get all my perfectly deterministic work output from human beings!
If only we had created some device that could perform deterministic calculations and then wrote software that made it easy for humans to use such calculations.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-10-2718:021 reply ok but humans are idiots, if only we could make some sort of Alternate Idiot, a non-human but every bit as generally stupid as humans are! This A.I would be able to do every stupid thing humans did with the device that performed deterministic calculations only many times faster!
By baconbrand 2025-10-2719:33 Yes and when the AI did that all the stupid humans could accept its output without question. This would save the humans a lot of work and thought and personal responsibility for any mistakes! See also Israel’s Lavender for an exciting example of this in action.
By CodeNest 2025-10-2718:41 [dead]
By timpieces 2025-10-280:11 Yes it's surprising to see so much cynicism for something that has a real possibility of making so many people so much more productive. My mental model of the average excel user is of someone who doesn't care about excel, but cares about their business. If Claude can help them use excel and learn about their business faster, then this should make the world more productive and we all get richer. Claude can make mistakes, but it's not clear to me why people think that the ratio of results to mistakes will get worse here. I think there are many possible reasons why this could not work out, but many of the comments here just seem like unfounded cynicism.
By nelox 2025-10-2723:40 Indeed. Take the New Zealand Department of Health as an example; it managed its entire NZD$28 billion budget (USD$16B) in a single Excel spreadsheet.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/nz_health_excel_sprea...
[edit: Added link]
By atleastoptimal 2025-10-2721:106 reply HN has a base of strong anti-AI bias, I assume is partially motivated by insecurity over being replaced, losing their jobs or having missed the boat on the AI.
Based on the comments here, it's surprisingly anything in society works at all. I didn't realize the bar was "everything perfect every time, perfectly flexible and adaptable". What a joy some of these folks must be to work with, answering every new technology with endless reasons why it's worthless and will never work.
By jay_kyburz 2025-10-2721:381 reply I think perhaps you underestimate how antithetical the current batch of LLM AI's is to what most programmers strive for every day, and what we want from our tools. Its not about losing our job, its about "correctness". (or as said below - deterministic)
In a lot of jobs, particularly in creative industries, or marketing, media and writing, the definition of a job well done is a fairly grey area. I think AI will be mostly disruptive in these areas.
But in programming there is a hard minimum of quality. Given a set of inputs, does the program return the correct answer or not? When you ask it what 2+2, do you get 4?
When you ask AI anything, it might be right 50% of the time, or 70% of the time, but you can't blindly trust the answer. A lot of us just find that not very useful.
By Aeolun 2025-10-2722:22 Modt of the time when using AI I have a lot more than 1 shot to ensure everything is correct.
By crote 2025-10-280:03 > HN has a base of strong anti-AI bias
If anything, HN, has a pro-AI bias. I don't know of any other medium where discussions about AI consistently get this much frontpage time, this amount of discussion, and this many people reporting positive experiences with it. It's definitely true that HN isn't the raging pro-AI hypetrain it was two years ago, but that shouldn't be mistaken for "strong anti-AI bias".
Outside of HN I am seeing, at best, an ambivalent reaction: plenty of people are interested, almost everyone tried it, very few people genuinely like it. They are happy to use it when it is convenient, but couldn't care less if it disappeared tomorrow.
There's also a small but vocal group which absolutely hates AI and will actively boycott any creative-related company stupid enough to admit to using it, but that crowd doesn't really seem to hang out on HN.
By lionkor 2025-10-2721:29 I use AI every day. Without oversight, it does not work well.
If it doesn't work well, I will do it myself, because I care that things are done well.
None of this is me being scared of being replaced; quite the opposite. I'm one of the last generations of programmers who learned how to program and can debug and fix the mess your LLM leaves behind when you forgot to add "make sure it's a clean design and works" to the prompt.
Okay, that's maybe hyperbole, but sadly only a little bit. LLMs make me better at my job, they don't replace me.
By hypeatei 2025-10-2721:24 > HN has a base of strong anti-AI bias
Quite the opposite, actually. You can always find five stories on the front page about some AI product or feature. Meanwhile, you have people like yourself who convince themselves that any pushback is done by people who just don't see the true value of it yet and that they're about to miss out!! Some kind of attempt at spreading FOMO, I guess.
By sothatsit 2025-10-2721:57 I really don’t think this is accurate. I think the median opinion here is to be suspicious of claims made about AI, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. But I also regularly see posts talking about AI positively (e.g. simonw), or talking about it negatively. I think this is a good thing, it is nice to have a diversity of opinions on a technology. It's a feature, not a bug.
By MattGaiser 2025-10-2721:19 HN has an obsession with quality too, which has merit, but is often economically irrelevant.
When US-East-1 failed, lots of people talked about how the lesson was cloud agnosticism and multi cloud architecture. The practical economic lesson for most is that if US-East-1 fails, nobody will get mad at you. Cloud failure is viewed as an act of god.
By II2II 2025-10-2723:03 > but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature.
I'm not even sure that has to be true anymore. From my admittedly superficial impression of the page, this appears to be a tool for building tools. There are plenty of organizations that are resource constrained, that are doing things the way they have always done thing in Excel, simply because they cannot allocate someone to modify what is already in place to better suit their current needs. For them, this is more of a quality of life and quality of out improvement. This is not like traditional software development, where organizations are far more likely to purchase a product or service to do a job (and where the vendors of those products and services are going to do their best to eliminate developers).
By pavel_lishin 2025-10-2716:563 reply My concern is that my insurance company will reject a claim, or worse, because of something an LLM did to a spreadsheet.
Now, granted, that can also happen because Alex fat-fingered something in a cell, but that's something that's much easier to track down and reverse.
They already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at higher numbers than before .
Privatized insurance will always find a way to pay out less if they could get away with it . It is just nature of having the trifecta of profit motive , socialized risk and light regulation .
If you think that insurance companies have "light regulation", I shudder to think of what "heavy regulation" would look like. (Source: I'm the CTO at an insurance company.)
Light did not mean to imply quantity of paperwork you have to do, rather are you allowed to do the things you want to do as a company.
More compliance or reporting requirements usually tend to favor the larger existing players who can afford to do it and that is also used to make the life difficult and reject more claims for the end user.
It is kind of thing that keeps you and me busy, major investors don't care about it all, the cost of the compliance or the lack is not more than a rounding number in the balance, the fines or penalties are puny and laughable.
The enormous profits year on year for decades now, the amount of consolidation allowed in the industry show that the industry is able to do mostly what they want pretty much, that is what I meant by light regulation.
I'm not sure we're looking at the same industry. Overall, insurance company profit margins are in the single digits, usually low single digits - and in many segments, they're frequently not profitable at all. To take one example, 2024 was the first profitable year for homeowners insurance companies since 2019, and even then, the segment's entire profit margin was 0.3% (not 3% - 0.3%).
https://riskandinsurance.com/us-pc-insurance-industry-posts-...
By bonoboTP 2025-10-2722:37 It's an accounting 101 thing to use all tricks in the book to reduce the reported profit, to avoid paying taxes on that profit.
By zetazzed 2025-10-2723:18 The total profit of ALL US health insurance companies added together was $9bln in 2024: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2024-annual-hea.... This is a profit margin of 0.8% down from 2.2% in the previous year.
Meta alone made $62bln in 2024: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
So it's weird to see folks on a tech site talking about how enormous all the profits are in health insurance, and citations with numbers would be helpful to the discussion.
I worked in insurance-related tech for some time, and the providers (hospitals, large physician groups) and employers who actually pay for insurance have signficant market power in most regions, limiting what insurers can charge.
By lotsofpulp 2025-10-2719:521 reply They have too much regulation, and too little auditing (at least in the managed healthcare business).
I agree, and I can see where it comes from (at least at the state level). The cycle is: bad trend happens that has deep root causes (let's say PE buying rural hospitals because of reduced Medicaid/Medicare reimbursements); legislators (rightfully) say "this shouldn't happen", but don't have the ability to address the deep root causes so they simply regulate healthcare M&As – now you have a bandaid on a problem that's going to pop up elsewhere.
By lotsofpulp 2025-10-2721:15 I mean even in the simple stuff like denying payment for healthcare that should have been covered. CMS will come by and out a handful of cases, out of millions, every few years.
So obviously the company that prioritizes accuracy of coverage decisions by spending money on extra labor to audit itself is wasting money. Which means insureds have to waste more time getting the payment for healthcare they need.
By philipallstar 2025-10-2718:511 reply > It is just nature of having the trifecta of profit motive , socialized risk and light regulation.
It's the nature of everything. They agree to pay you for something. It's nothing specific to "profit motive" in the sense you mean it.
By manquer 2025-10-2720:35 I should have been clearer - profit maximization above all else as long it is mostly legal. Neither profit or profit maximization at all cost is nature of everything .
There are many other entity types from unions[1], cooperatives , public sector companies , quasi government entities, PBC, non profits that all offer insurance and can occasionally do it well.
We even have some in the US and don’t think it is communism even - like the FDIC or things like social security/ unemployment insurance.
At some level government and taxation itself is nothing but insurance ? We agree to paying taxes to mitigate against variety of risks including foreign invasion or smaller things like getting robbed on the street.
[1] Historically worker collectives or unions self-organized to socialize the risks of both major work ending injuries or death.
Ancient to modern armies operate on because of this insurance the two ingredients that made them not mercenaries - a form of long term insurance benefit (education, pension, land etc) or family members in the event of death and sovereign immunity for their actions.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-2719:071 reply > They already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at higher numbers than before
Source?
By nartho 2025-10-2720:41 Haven't risk based models been a thing for the last 15-20 years ?
Couldn't they accomplish the same thing by rejecting a certain percentage of claims totally at random?
That would be illegal though, the goal is do this legally after all.
We also have to remember all claims aren't equal. i.e. some claims end up being way costlier than others. You can achieve similar % margin outcomes by putting a ton of friction like, preconditions, multiple appeals processes and prior authorization for prior authorization, reviews by administrative doctors who have no expertise in the field being reviewed don't have to disclose their identity and so and on.
While U.S. system is most extreme or evolved, it is not unique, it is what you get when you end up privatize insurance any country with private insurance has some lighter version of this and is on the same journey .
Not that public health system or insurance a la NHS in UK or like Germany work, they are underfunded, mismanaged with long times in months to see a specialist and so on.
We have to choose our poison - unless you are rich of course, then the U.S. system is by far the best, people travel to the U.S. to get the kind of care that is not possible anywhere else.
> While U.S. system is most extreme or evolved, it is not unique, it is what you get when you end up privatize insurance any country with private insurance has some lighter version of this and is on the same journey .
I disagree with the statement that healthcare insurance is predominantly privatized in the US: Medicare and Medicaid, at least in 2023, outspent private plans for healthcare spending by about ~10% [1]; this is before accounting for government subsidies for private plans. And boy, does America have a very unique relationship with these programs.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
By manquer 2025-10-2723:24 It is more nuanced, for example Medicare Advantage(Part C) is paid by Medicare money but it is profitable private operators who provide the plans and service it a fast growing part of Medicare .
John Oliver had an excellent segment coincidentally yesterday on this topic.
While the government pays for it, it is not managed or run by them so how to classify the program as public or private ?
By jimbokun 2025-10-2721:02 Why does saying "AI did it" make it legal, if the outcome is the same?
>>They already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at higher numbers than before .
That's a feature, not a bug.
This is a great application of this quote. Insurance providers have 0 incentive to make their AI "good" at processing claims, in fact it's easy to see how "bad" AI can lead to a justification to deny more claims.
By bonoboTP 2025-10-2722:39 The question is how you define good. They surely want the Ai to be good in the sense that it rejects all claims that they think can get away with rejecting. But it should not reject those where rejection likely results in litigation and losing and having to pay damages.
By wombatpm 2025-10-2720:14 Wait until a company has to restate earnings because of a bug in a Claudified Excel spreadsheet.
By inquirerGeneral 2025-10-2717:48 [dead]
The vast majority of people in business and science are using spreadsheets for complex algorithmic things they weren't really designed for, and we find a metric fuckton of errors in the sheets when you actually bother looking auditing them, mistakes which are not at all obvious without troubleshooting by... manually checking each and every cell & cell relation, peering through parentheses, following references. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot.
LLMs specialize in making up plausible things with a minimum of human effort, but their downside is that they're very good at making up plausible things which are covertly erroneous. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot.
There is already an abject inability to provision the labor to verify Excel reasoning when it's composed by humans.
I'm dead certain that Claude will be able to produce plausibly correct spreadsheets. How important is accuracy to you? How life-critical is the end result? What are your odds, with the current auditing workflow?
Okay! Now! Half of the users just got laid off because management thinks Claude is Good Enough. How about now?
LLMs are getting quite good at reviewing the results and implementations, though
By lionkor 2025-10-2721:34 Not really, they're only as good as their context and they do miss and forget important things. It doesn't matter how often, because they do, and they will tell you with 100% confidence and with every synonym of "sure" that they caught it all. That's the issue.
By singleshot_ 2025-10-280:00 Can’t speak for everyone, but the reason I’m negative in the context of this idea is that it’s a stupid idea.
By burnte 2025-10-2722:08 > What is with the negativity in these comments?
A lot of us have seen the effects of AI tools in the hands of people who don't understand how or why to use the tools. I've already seen AI use/misuse get two people fired. One was a line-of-business employee who relied on output without ever checking it, got herself into a pretty deep hole in 3 weeks. Another was a C suite person who tried to run an AI tool development project and wasted double their salary in 3 months, nothing to show for it but the bill, fired.
In both cases the person did not understand the limits of the tools and kept replacing facts with their desires and their own misunderstanding of AI. The C suite person even tried to tell a vendor they were wrong about their own product because "I found out from AI".
AI right now is fireworks. It's great when you know how to use it, but if you half-ass it you'll blow your fingers off very easily.
By gadders 2025-10-2717:35 Yeah, this could be a pretty big deal. Not everyone is an excel expert, but nearly everyone finds themselves having to work with data in excel at some time or other.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-10-2721:12 It is bad in a very specific sense, but I did not see any other comments express the bad parts instead of focusing merely on the accuracy part ( which is an issue, but not the issue ):
- this opens up ridiculous flood of data that would otherwise be semi-private to one company providing this service - this works well small data sets, but will choke on ones it will need to divvy up into chunks inviting interesting ( and yet unknown ) errors
There is a real benefit to being able to 'talk to data', but anyone who has seen corporate culture up close and personal knows exactly where it will end.
edit: an i saying all this as as person, who actually likes llms.
By pluc 2025-10-2720:47 Anthropic now has all your company's data, and all you saved was the cost of one human minus however much they charge for this. The good news is it can't have your data again! So starting from the 163rd-165th person you fire, you start to see a good return and all you've sacrificed is exactitude, precision, judgement, customer service and a little bit of public perception!
By threetonesun 2025-10-2720:32 Probably because many people here are software developers, and wrapping spreadsheets in deterministic logic and a consistent UI covers... most software use cases.
By trollbridge 2025-10-2721:35 The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they tend to be accounts for the accumulation of technical debt, which is an area that AI tools are not yet very good at retiring, but very good at making additional withdrawals from.
> but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature.
Perhaps this is part of the negativity? This is a bad thing for the middle class.
By jpadkins 2025-10-2719:57 in the short run. In the long run, productivity gains benefit* all of us (in a functional market economy).
*material benefit. In terms of spirit and purpose, the older I get the more I think maybe the Amish are on to something. Work gives our lives purpose, and the closer the work is to our core needs, the better it feels. Labor saving so that most of us are just entertaining each other on social networks may lead to a worse society (but hey, our material needs are met!)
By informal007 2025-10-2720:24 agree with you, but it cannot be stopped. development of technology always makes wealth distribution more centralized
What does scaffolding of spreadsheets mean? I see the term scaffolding frequently in the context of AI-related articles and not familiar with this method and I’m hesitant to ask an LLM.
By Rudybega 2025-10-2718:30 Scaffolding typically just refers to a larger state machine style control flow governing an agent's behavior and the suite of external tools it has access to.
By BuildItBusk 2025-10-2719:052 reply I have to admit that my first thought was “April’s fool”. But you are right. It makes a lot of sense (if they can get it to work well). Not only is Excel the world’s biggest “programming language”. It’s probably also one of the most unintuitive ways to program.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-2723:08 Honestly as a dev I hate Excel its a whole mess I dont understand. I will gladly use Claude for Excel. It will understand the business needs from the data more than I a mere developer just trying to get back to regular developer work.
By lacker 2025-10-2720:40 It's like the negativity whenever a post talks about hiring or firing. A lot of people are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs to AI.
By informal007 2025-10-2720:21 this will push the development of open source models.
people think of privacy at first regards of data, local deployment of open source models are the first choice for them
I used to live in excel.
The issue isn’t in creating a new monstrosity in excel.
The issue is the poor SoB who has to spelunk through the damn thing to figure out what it does.
Excel is the sweet spot of just enough to be useful, capable enough to be extensible, yet gated enough to ensure everyone doesn’t auto run foreign macros (or whatever horror is more appropriate).
In the simplest terms - it’s not excel, it’s the business logic. If an excel file works, it’s because theres someone who “gets” it in the firm.
I used to live in Excel too. I've trudged through plenty of awful worksheets. The output I've seen from AI is actually more neatly organized than most of what I used to receive in outlook. Most of that wasn't hyper-sophisticated cap table analyses. It was analysis from a Jr Analyst or line employee trying to combine a few different data sources to get some signal on how XYZ function of the business was performing. AI automation is perfectly suitable for this.
By intended 2025-10-2718:16 How?
Neat formatting didn't save any model from having the wrong formula pasted in.
Being neat was never a substitute for being well rested, or sufficiently caffeinated.
Have you seen how AI functions in the hands of someone who isn't a domain expert? I've used it for things I had no idea about, like Astro+ web dev. User ignorance was magnified spectacularly.
This is going to have Jr Analysts dumping well formatted junk in email boxes within a month.
By tokai 2025-10-2719:15 Whats with claiming negativity when most of the comments here are positive?
By Workaccount2 2025-10-2719:571 reply I think excel is a dead end. LLM agents will probably greatly prefer SQL, sqlite, and Python instead of bulky made-for-regular-folks excel.
Versatility and efficiency explode while human usability tanks, but who cares at that point?
By informal007 2025-10-2720:34 Database might be the future, but viable solution on excel are evidence to prove that it works
By gedy 2025-10-2717:29 It's actually really cool. I will say that "spreadsheets" remain a bandaid over dysfunctional UIs, processes, etc and engineering spends a lot of time enabling these bandaids vs someone just saying "I need to see number X" and not "a BI analytics data in a realtime spreadsheet!", etc.
By doctorpangloss 2025-10-2717:001 reply > What is with the negativity in these comments?
Some people - normal people - understand the difference between the holistic experience of a mathematically informed opinion and an actual model.
It's just that normal people always wanted the holistic experience of an answer. Hardly anyone wants a right answer. They have an answer in their heads, and they want a defensible journey to that answer. That is the purpose of Excel in 95% of places it is used.
Lately people have been calling this "syncophancy." This was always the problem. Sycophancy is the product.
Claude Excel is leaning deeply into this garbage.
By behnamoh 2025-10-2718:49 > How teams use Claude for Excel
Who are these teams that can get value from Anthropic? One MCP and my context window is used up and Claude tells me to start a new chat.
I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.
The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".
This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.
For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.
Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!
By bonoboTP 2025-10-2722:34 > Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.
Based on the history of digitalization of businesses from the 1980s onwards, the spreadsheets will just balloon in number and size and there will be more rules and more procedures and more forms and reports to file until the efficiency gains are neutralized (or almost neutralized).
Seems 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.
If 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?
By libraryatnight 2025-10-2720:501 reply "not even Devil can help you.
But maybe, juuuuust maybe, AI can?"
Bold assumption that the devil and AI aren't aligned ;)
By lavishlibra0810 2025-10-2723:52 The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist
Also people complaining about AI inaccuracy are just technical people that like precision. The vast majority of the world is people who dont give a damn about accuracy or even correctness. They just want to appear as if not completely useless to people that could potentially affect their salary
By Yizahi 2025-10-2722:59 I can pretty reliably guess that approximately 100% of all companies in the world use excel tables for financial data and for processes. Ok, this was a joke. It's actually 99.99% of all companies. One would think that financial data, inventory and stuff like that should be damn precise. No?
By lionkor 2025-10-2721:43 "just" technical people who like precision are the reason we are here, typing this, and why lots of parts of our world is pretty cool and comfortable. I wouldn't say that's useless and "just" some people when it clearly is generating unmistakable value
By davidpolberger 2025-10-2719:43 I'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)
