Anthropic Automates Excel and PowerPoint Workflows With One-Click Skills

Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint now share full context across open files and allow users to save skills that make processes repeatable in the future.

Anthropic announced these features in a Wednesday (March 11) blog post, saying they enable users to complete tasks faster.

Claude’s ability to pass context across multiple Excel and PowerPoint files in one conversation ensures that every action the artificial intelligence assistant takes in one application is informed by what’s happening in the other, according to the post.

“A financial analyst can pull comparable company financials from an open workbook and other data sources,” Anthropic said in the post. “From there, they could build out a trading comps table in Excel, drop the valuation summary into the pitch deck, and draft the email to the MD—without switching tabs or re-explaining the dataset at each step.”

The new skills feature in Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint enables users who have developed a workflow to turn that complete workflow into a one-click action that can be repeated in the future, per the post.

Anthropic has also shipped skills covering common use cases for the two applications, the post said. These include, for Excel, a skill for auditing a model for formula errors and balance-sheet integrity, and, for PowerPoint, a skill for building competitive landscape decks.

“When someone on the team figures out the right way to run a variance analysis or compose a client deck using the firm’s template, saving it as a skill makes that process instantly repeatable for the future,” Anthropic said in the post.

PYMNTS reported in February that Anthropic is expanding how enterprises can deploy Claude inside day-to-day work by rolling out new Cowork updates and a broader set of plugins and connectors designed to turn the model into role-specific agents that sit alongside existing software rather than replacing it.

In another move, the company introduced a marketplace that includes third-party tools for Claude. The Claude Marketplace, now in limited preview, will provide a way for enterprises to simplify their procurement of AI tools. It allows enterprises to browse Claude-powered tools and add partners to meet their evolving needs.

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