On Excel, we all know that moment. The #REF! that pops up out of nowhere, the baffling #N/A, the formula you no longer dare touch for fear of breaking everything.
For a long time, AI wasn't really much help: there was no clean way to work with an Excel file or a csv. That has changed.
Today, building a table, cleaning data or generating a financial model takes just a few minutes. You just need to pick the right method.
I'm sharing 3 options, each with its strengths and its limits. I lean heavily on the example of Claude, but the same logic applies to ChatGPT. Microsoft Copilot and Gemini Workspace work on the same principle, but rarely go as far.
Option 1: Claude / ChatGPT inside Excel
This is the simplest option. You open Excel, you add the Claude plugin by following this link, and you're set. (The plugin's rating isn't great, yet the tool is very powerful, as you'll see.)
Once connected, you use Claude inside Excel (a paid plan is required, starting from Pro at $20/month). What used to take you 3 hours now takes a few minutes.
Claude keeps the same capabilities as in chat mode: web search, connectors to pull in data, skills and plugins (off-the-shelf or custom). Here's an example with building a DCF model:
And it follows structured steps to carry out your request, just like in Cowork (see below).
Same logic on the questions side: it queries you with Ask_User_Question before executing, to avoid heading in the wrong direction.
The use cases are many, here's an example with building financial models:
You can even click the blue links in the conversation to point straight to the formula.
Another example: generating fictional sales data, with hundreds of rows created in a few seconds:
A few more use cases, in no particular order:
- Explaining a file with its interdependencies → very handy for understanding a new file. Claude even lets you select the references.
- Data cleaning → spotting duplicate rows / matches that can be tricky to reconcile
- Formatting a column → turning a column of phone numbers into a clean +33 format
- Generating complex formulas
- Fixing errors in a formula
- Generating charts, pivot tables, even a dashboard with filters like here:
On this one-pager, I sum up all the possibilities:
Option 2: Claude Cowork
For a refresher on Cowork, I published this edition several weeks ago:
Claude Cowork: the tool you're not using (and that changes everything)
Cowork lets you generate advanced Excel files while staying inside Claude. You can work in a file environment on your computer (potentially handy depending on the context). You just select the project:
I recommend enabling connectors like Google Drive if you're on Google Workspace like me:
Once that's done, when you ask it to create a file, to build a performance report for example, you can export the result straight to Google Sheets for manual edits:
You also get access to the charts generated by Claude via the “Charts” tab:
Here's the result directly in Google Sheets. As you can see the formulas are editable, same for the charts, and the sheets are imported correctly:
A closer look at artifacts and live artifacts
When you have an Excel file, you can turn it into an interactive dashboard (in HTML format) that can be shared with the team. This is what we call artifacts on Claude (canvas on ChatGPT). It's the right-hand side generated by Claude.
Recently, Claude also lets you create live artifacts. Very powerful for turning raw data sitting in Google Sheets into a dashboard that updates in real time.
One idea to go from Claude Cowork, which generates your Excel, to an interface that is visually more appealing and connected in real time.
I find it especially useful given that most reporting is scattered across Excel files. So you change nothing in your organization except how the result is displayed.
An example of a dashboard:
or here as well (fictional):
I encourage you to create a live artifact → you need to go through Cowork for this. You'll then get a creation prompt after your request:
Option 3: Claude Code
Claude Code is the option to choose for more complex tasks. That could be when you have large files, with a lot of formatting operations for example, etc
In some cases, importing several files and cross-referencing them can't be done directly in Excel, so Claude Code is the best option. Claude can run scripts to go further on all the tasks we saw earlier (cleaning, formatting, analysis, etc) while handing you back a clean Excel format you can then import.
It's in a different league from using Claude chat, and even from Cowork, which sits between the two.
Several examples to run in Claude Code:
- multi-file consolidation → “I have 14 monthly sales exports in this folder, with headers that aren't always named the same way. Consolidate them into a single Excel file, harmonize the columns, remove duplicate orders, and add a summary tab with revenue by month and by region.”
- Large file to clean → “This file has 80,000 rows with dates in 4 different formats and amounts stored as text. Clean everything, put the dates in YYYY-MM-DD format, convert the amounts into numbers, and give me back a clean file ready to import.”
- Cross-referencing several sources → “Cross-reference this customer file with this billing export, flag the customers with no invoice in the last 6 months, and generate an Excel file with one tab per status.”
