Anthropic Brings Claude Inside Excel

Anthropic is deepening its focus on financial services with the launch of Claude for Excel and new real-time data integrations, aiming to streamline financial analysis and modelling. The update expands Claude’s role as an AI assistant for financial professionals, particularly those using Microsoft’s tools.

Currently in beta as a research preview, Claude for Excel lets users interact directly with Claude via a sidebar in Microsoft Excel. The model can read, analyse, and modify workbooks while maintaining transparency by tracking and explaining each change. It also helps with debugging formulas, generating financial models, and building new spreadsheets from scratch, tasks that typically consume hours of analyst time.

The Excel integration adds to Anthropic’s existing suite of Microsoft collaborations. Within Claude apps, users can already create and edit Excel and PowerPoint files, and search across Microsoft 365, including emails and Teams conversations. Select Claude models are also embedded in Microsoft Copilot Studio and Researcher Agent.

Anthropic is inviting 1,000 initial users from Max, Enterprise, and Teams tiers to test the Excel add-in before a wider rollout.

Alongside the Excel release, the company is introducing new connectors that allow Claude to access live financial data. These include integrations with Aiera for earnings calls, LSEG for market data, Moody’s for credit ratings, and Egnyte for secure document access. Additional sources such as Chronograph, Third Bridge, and MT Newswires enhance Claude’s capabilities in portfolio monitoring, valuation, and research.

Anthropic has also released six new pre-built Agent Skills designed for finance professionals. These skills help generate discounted cash flow models, conduct due diligence, produce company profiles, and compile initiating coverage reports.

The company said these updates build on Sonnet 4.5’s state-of-the-art performance in finance benchmarks, scoring 55.3% on the Finance Agent benchmark from Vals AI. With these additions, Claude is positioned to become a more embedded tool for banks, asset managers, and investment firms, assisting across front, middle, and back-office functions.