Claude for Excel

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

I 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.

> 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.

I would recommend trying TabTabTab at 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.

Last 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.

Gemini integratoins to Google workspace feels like it's using Gemini 1.5 flash, it's so comically bad at understanding and generating

I 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.

The 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.

I think this is aiming to be Claude Code for people who use Excel as a programming environment.

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

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

Tier 5 requires domain expertise until we reach AGI or something very different from the latest LLMs.

I don’t think the frontier labs have the bandwidth or domain knowledge (or dare I say skills) to do tier 5 tasks well. Even their chat UIs leave a lot to be desired and that should be their core competency.

People 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.

George 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.

Claude is a model wrapper, no?

Interesting. I found a reference to this in a tweet [1], and it looks to be a podcast. While I'm not extremely knowledgable. I'd put it like this: Tier 1 - fabs, Tier 2 - chip makers, Tier 3 - data centers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers

However I would think more of elite data centers rather than commodity data centers. That's because I see Tier 4 being deeply involved in their data centers and thinking of buying the chips to feed their data centers. I wouldn't be so inclined to throw in my opinion immediately if I found an article showing this ordering of the tiers, but being a tweet of a podcast it might have just been a rough draft.

1: https://x.com/tbpn/status/1935072881425400016

When 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.

I 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.