Transcript

Alright so the Claude add-in for Excel it’s incredibly useful and like the rest of the the add-ins for the office apps its primary goal is to keep your interactions with it really really quick. So everything I’m about to show you could do in the desktop app and it would still do it. The problem there is that every time it makes a change, it’s going to give you back a fresh document.

And so you can say, hey, go and insert this piece of information. It says, hey, here’s the new document version. You download it. Check what it did. Okay, you want to make further changes, you have another check. Download the next version of the document. Check it. Having the add-in inside of Excel makes it really quick. You can see what it’s doing. It has some extra context about what you might be looking at or specifically highlighting.

And so it’s quite useful in that respect. So we’ve got a classic contrived example of, this is the form we need to put all our invoices into so that we can send it off to the accounts team for processing. And so I just jump up here to the top right and open up my Claude add-in. It expands on the right-hand side side here and you’ll see there that it’s already noted how you’ve got some particular cells highlighted.

Now that is how you can give it context without having to say those things. You know the last thing you want to say is okay we’ll look at cells E16 to you know F7 or whatever the case might be. You can just come in here and highlight it and it’ll update that on the So you can say things like, update this row, and it’ll know what row you’re talking about ’cause you’ve got it selected.

So it’s quite useful in that respect. Now I have, in classic demo fashion, a really boring fake invoice. It’s got a bunch of line items, a bunch of details, whatever. Now my job in this case, would be to copy paste these line items into the Excel sheet and then fire it off to accounts. I don’t need to do that anymore. I can just pull the PDF in so I’m going to drop and drag it.

See that’s going to come across here into the chat and I can say extract the invoice data and fill out the two sheets. Cool. So it’s gonna go and read that PDF. It’s gonna see pretty clearly, has an invoice, has some line items. Let me go rip that out. And it should insert it into the form. Now, whatever I had selected, I think I had this row here selected.

Now it has the row seven has selected as content, but that doesn’t necessarily block it. It’s gonna see that and go, well, hang on a minute, we should probably put in row six. So it’ll figure that out and it’ll go and do those changes. And it’ll probably make a reference to that in its response. It’ll say something like, hey, you had row seven selected, but we did this instead.

Now I can see it’s already working, right? There are already things popping up here that’s fantastic. We’ll wait to see these line items come through. Now you can expand this and see what it’s doing or what it’s done but most of the time I wouldn’t worry about it. There you go, bang all that stuff just appeared. Perfect. Row 6’s check formulas were missing so I’m copying the templates check formulas from row 7.

Okay cool so So it’s determined, hey, there’s like a little bit of an issue, maybe with the spreadsheet, she’s kind of resolved it for me. That’s nice. And so it’s gonna go through and complete that work. So again, it’s also going to come back with what it’s done, a bit of a summary. Now you can see here you’ve got some links. So if you click this, it’ll take us back and highlight the section it’s talking about.

It’s like, it’s the citation for what change it made. Right. And so you can go and check those things, particularly if you had a big Excel sheet, if I already had, you know, the last 10 invoices in here and I wanna see what is added, then that’ll be there. I can click it and it’ll tell me, Hey, this, you know, show me, you know, quite frankly highlight it.

Right. And tell me that this is the stuff I’ve added. And, you know, there’s some cool all that serious to what’s happened, what’s been done, how to fix those formulas. I added a source note for some stuff, cool. Like I can see here that it’s actually added the source note at the top, it’s a row six as a worked example. And so that is incredibly useful. Now I could continue the chat here, you know, if I need to, let’s say I want to dig into the data a little bit more.

I can tell it things like, hey, go and create me an interactive pivot table that I can go and explore these things. Or do I quickly assess the invoices that we’ve got here? Anything same anomalous? Are there items here that are duplicates? Like there are those kinds of checks you could do here really quickly and have it help you do that work. Now, if you happen to be one of the Excel gurus in the audience, and you like to do rather complicated things, Claw can also help you build out some of those more advanced functions, right?

You wanna do a crazy V lookup or an X lookup, you know, match two tables together, those kinds of things. Lean on Claw to do it, right? You already know what you need, you know roughly what that’s going to be, going to look like, leverage Claude. Get it to do that heavy lifting for you. It will produce all those functions. It will write them. But at the end of the day, you’re still in the Excel doc, right?

You can come in here and modify what you need to. If it got something wrong, you can just come in and change it. That’s not a problem at all. And so it’s still very much your document. And that’s really important because you’re still going to be accountable for it, right? If I send this off to accounts and it’s wrong, I can’t say, oh, sorry, Claude ate my homework.

I’m going to cop the blame for it, right? Which is fair enough. So the job here, though, might have changed from being a 10-minute copy-paste task into a one-minute checking. So I might pull up the… PDF on one side, Excel on the other, do the spot check. Right? I still have to do some work, still important. I’m the one with the brain. I understand what the heck we’re trying to do here.

But don’t have to do that monotonous copy paste stuff like that stuff has fallen away now. So the Claude out in for Excel is very useful. I would highly recommend giving it a crack. And if you are particular If you think, “Hey, whoa, whoa, I want to give it these documents that are serious. It makes a change and I don’t know what it’s done.” Just copy the file that you want to do things on, put it on your desktop and have a play with it.

See how it goes. You can do that. There’s nothing that says you must give it the real document that’s only the one that could cause problems gets it wrong, you can test it out with fake documents or a copy of the production document. And so I think that, you know, I’m yet to meet a person who used it and thought, nah, I’d rather go back to not having it.

And so, you know, I’m pretty confident saying that you’ll have a good time with it once you get in there. So yeah, get, get, jump in, have a crack. And hopefully you have a good time, but let’s, let’s move on to the next.