Claude strengthens its Excel, PowerPoint skills

By
Sabrina Ortiz
•

Mar 11, 2026

•

3:05pm UTC

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hile Anthropic doesn’t offer a productivity suite of apps like Google or Microsoft, it is expanding its integrations with Microsoft 365 applications.

On Wednesday, Anthropic launched updates to Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint, expanding the ways it can assist users and making the connection between them more seamless. For instance, both tools now share the full context of your conversation by understanding the context of open files and carrying it across apps.

Anthropic suggests a use case for that feature would be a financial analyst having Claude pull company financials, then use those to build a trading compass table in Excel, and ultimately drop the summary of those findings into the pitch deck without switching tabs or re-explaining the information you already fed it.

The Skill feature, which allows users to create reusable, shareable workflows, is now also available inside Excel and PowerPoint add-ins. This is especially useful for enterprises that need all slide decks to follow a specific template or use a specific Excel number format. The company is also shipping a starter set that covers the most common Excel and PowerPoint use cases.

Lastly, organizations can now route traffic from the Claude add-ins through an existing LLM gateway to Claude models running on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud's Vertex AI, or Microsoft Foundry. This is particularly valuable for enterprise users whose compliance or security requirements already tie them to one of these cloud platforms.

The improved Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint context-sharing experience will be available for all Mac and Windows users on paid plans in beta starting today. Skills and cloud platform deployment are also available starting today.

Our Deeper View

Anthropic largely appeals to risk-averse enterprises because of its safety and privacy policies, the absence of public scandals, and, perhaps most importantly, a wide array of tools that cater to working professionals. This update showcases just that: Anthropic knows who its target audience is and continues to ship features that benefit them. Overall, it remains a smart play that is delivering results, as CEO Dario Amodei reported that 80% of Anthropic’s business comes from enterprises and only 20% from consumers. While Google released similar tools in its Workspace app this week, Microsoft 365's is more geared towards high-expertise professionals, giving Anthropic's Excel and PowerPoint add-ins a more natural home.