You've probably worked with Excel and struggled with a report that eats your Friday afternoons. You manually click through it cell by cell, tracing where the numbers come from, and hoping nothing important hides on tab 3.

Claude for Excel changes that! Over this course, you'll get formulas explained and fixed, messy exports cleaned, pivot tables and dashboards built by describing them — until that Friday report assembles itself while you review.

Let's get started!

Claude for Excel is an add-in that puts Claude in a sidebar right inside Excel. It reads the workbook you have open — every tab of it — and answers questions about it in plain language.

Imagine you're the operations coordinator at Northframe, a furniture retailer with a dozen stores. A colleague leaves the company, and their sales tracker lands on you: three tabs, zero notes, and a monthly report due next week.

The usual way through is slow — clicking cell after cell, tracing formulas by hand. Let's try a different approach with Claude for Excel!

Setup is a one-time job: open Excel on the web platform, then open the App menu on the left, and click More apps.

Find "Claude by Anthropic for Excel" on Microsoft's add-in marketplace and add it.

Then sign in with your Claude account.

The add-in runs in Excel on the web, Windows, Mac, and iPad. In this course, you'll practice with Excel on the web.

After the guided setup process, Claude appears in a sidebar next to your sheet, ready to open the workbook.

The tracker is open, and the sidebar is waiting — the smartest first move is orientation: have Claude describe the workbook before you change or trust anything.

The empty sidebar greets you with a few chips, like "/audit-xls" and "/clean-data-xls". These are Skills — reusable instructions that help Claude repeat a task consistently each time.

Click one, and a full prompt appears in the reply box, with a placeholder left for you to fill.

For a workbook you've never seen, "/audit-xls" is the right chip: it sweeps every formula, reference, and format for problems.

Since you barely know this file, you'll add one line of your own before sending. Let's practice!

Great! Two findings in under a minute, but notice what each one really is: a claim. And every claim arrives with a cell citation.

Click the one on Summary!D4, and Excel jumps straight to that cell, so checking takes seconds instead of trust.

Skills are shortcuts, but the sidebar's native language is yours — anything you can describe, you can ask, no chip required. The audit checked the file's health. Now find out what the file actually does.

Nice work! Within 20 minutes, you know this tracker's health, its structure, and its one oddity — more than any handover note would have told you. And every claim came with cells you clicked and checked yourself.

It is important to know what the Claude for Excel can and cannot do:

The tracker that promised a lost afternoon took 20 minutes — mapped, explained, and checked against its own cells. The monthly report is no longer a mystery; it's a workbook you understand.

That's the full first-session rhythm:

The same workflow you'll repeat with every unfamiliar workbook in front of you. Let's practice and put the steps in order!

Great! You can now check a workbook's health, ask what it does, and prove every answer. Next, you'll focus on formulas — creating and fixing them with Claude. Let's keep going!