Getting started with Claude in Excel

1. SPSpeaker0:00

   [upbeat music] Claude in Excel is a powerful AI agent right inside your spreadsheet. Everything you do manually, Claude can help with. Whether you're in finance, building valuation models, in accounting, reconciling data, or in operations, tracking performance, Claude can work the way that you do. You open it with Control + Option + C on Mac or Control + Alt + C on Windows. So let's try starting by asking questions about your workbook. Claude can look through the data and use it to answer questions that would otherwise require manual calculation. Here's an expense report with seven line items. I want to keep my travel and meal budget under forty percent of my total spend. So let's ask Claude, "I'm trying to keep my travel and meal budget to under forty percent of my total costs. Did I hit that target?" Then Claude calculates the total, adds up travel and meals, computes the percentage, and tells me I'm just under budget. It shows the math so I can verify. Claude can also help you with errors. It knows what error messages mean and couples that with knowledge of your dataset to provide more valuable debugging information. So right here we have a monthly sales sheet with an error in the average price column for May. To find out the problem, we can simply ask, "Why is there an error in May?" Claude traces the error to its source. The formula in D6 divides revenue by units, but cell C6 is empty, so no units mean division by zero. Claude suggests a fix: fill in the missing data. So Claude traced the error without me having to click into the cell, read the formula, and check each reference manually. It just did it on its own. Formulas can be opaque, especially in spreadsheets that you didn't build. Claude can break them down for you. So here's a grade book right here that uses VLOOKUP to convert numeric scores into letter grades. If you inherit this spreadsheet, the grading logic might not be obvious just from looking at it. I know it isn't to me. So when we ask Claude, "How does the letter grade formula work?" Claude breaks down the formula piece by piece. It gives us citation boxes so we can jump directly to the cells being referenced. It shows that the formula is in column C and that it's VLOOKUP. Then it explains the parameter, the lookup value, the table array, the column index, and that true means approximate matching. So far, we've asked Claude single questions, but Claude can also work through multi-step tasks like cleaning messy data and building a model from scratch. This workbook right here has a raw sales sheet with monthly revenue data from the past three years. But before we can build anything useful, we need to clean this up. So we can give Claude a clear prompt: "Clean the raw sales data, standardize all days to YYYY-MM-DD format, remove duplicate entries, sort by date, and create a summary of an annual view in a new sheet called Historical." Claude asks for permission before modifying the spreadsheet. Once I approve, it works through the data and reports what it did. It standardized all the date formats, it removed three duplicate entries, and sorted thirty-four remaining records chronologically. It also created a historical sheet with annual revenue totals and transaction counts for each year. Claude even adds context. "2024 revenue shows a sixteen percent increase over twenty-twenty-three, and twenty-twenty-five is on track to finish strong with only ten months of data recorded." Awesome. Now we have clean historical data. Let's build a forecast. "Based on the historical revenue, build a three-year forecast on the Forecast sheet and calculate the average annual growth rate and use it to project twenty-twenty-six, twenty-twenty-seven, and twenty-twenty-eight. Put the growth rate assumption on the Assumptions sheet so I can adjust it later." It fills in the Assumptions sheet with this rate and builds out the Forecast sheet with projections through twenty-twenty-eight. The model is fully dynamic. All forecast values are linked via formulas to the growth rate in the Assumptions sheet. Claude also adds context, noting that twenty-twenty-five only includes ten months of data, which affects the calculated growth rate. The same approach works for finance professionals needing more complex financial analysis. Here's a workbook with five years of historical financials. We can ask Claude to build a DCF model to value this company, use a ten percent discount rate, three percent terminal growth, and project five years of cash flows based on historical trends. Show me the implied enterprise value. Claude analyzes the historical growth rates and margins, fills in the Assumptions sheet, and builds out a complete DCF model. It projects free cash flows, calculates the terminal value, discounts everything back to present value, and shows the implied enterprise value. The model is fully dynamic. If I want to test different assumptions, I can ask Claude to adjust the discount rate or growth rate, and the valuation updates automatically. Pivot tables are one of Excel's most powerful features and one of its hardest to master. Claude can build them for you. This workbook right here has a year of sales transactions, dates, regions, products, sales reps, and revenue. "Create a pivot table showing total revenue by region and product." Claude builds the pivot table, organizing revenue by region in the rows and product in the same columns. It's the same pivot table you'd build manually, but Claude handles the setup. Now create a chart from this pivot table showing revenue by region. Claude creates a chart from the pivot table. It chooses an appropriate chart type and adds labels. Claude can then edit any part of the chart: the type, the axes, the title, or the colors. Change the chart to be a stacked bar chart and add a title. [upbeat music] Claude shows you every change it makes and explains its reasoning. Use this transparency. You can click the citation boxes in Claude's responses to jump directly to the cells being referenced. Your organization may have specific methodologies. Verify the outputs match your standards, especially for work that will be shared externally. And for sensitive or regulated data, always follow your organization's data handling policies. Whether you're in finance building valuation models, in accounting cleaning up GL data, in operations analyzing sales performance, or just someone who uses Excel extensively, Claude can help you move much faster. Claude compresses the mechanical work so you can focus on the decisions, what assumptions to use, what scenarios to test, and what story does the data tell. Open the sidebar with Control + Option + C on Mac or Control + Alt + C on Windows. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 7:09