Anthropic’s recent product announcements have caused equity market ructions, so I try Claude in Excel, which offers to change the way financial analysts do their work.

The Financial Press has been full of articles attributing the recent market sell-offs in specific sectors to product announcements by Anthropic, for example Bloomberg has “Anthropic AI Tool Sparks Sellof From Software to Broader Market“ and the Financial Times has “The great software stock meltdown“.

This week Citrini Research published, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crises” with the tagline:

What if our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish?

This and other articles postulate that AI Tools and Agents will greatly reduce white-collar jobs in legal, financial and professional services. While we need to see employment data in the years ahead, to verify or disapprove this thesis, there is no doubt that GenAI tools are rapidly improving and offer productivity gains and automation.

Today’s article is my first look at Claude in Excel, a tool that offers to significantly improve how financial analysts and others work with Microsoft Excel.

Getting Started

The Use Claude in Excel page, has a Get started section showing how to get the add-in from the Microsoft Marketplace and then use the Add-ins button to activate and sign-in with your Claude credentials.

That was simple enough.

Let’s see what we can do.

Netflix Financials

Another story in the financial news has been the bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Bros. So let’s start by looking at Netflix financials.

Get me Netflix Income Statements and Balance Sheets for the past 3 years, use SEC filings data

And the Claude in Excel box started working and showing its’ progress.

And great to see it can pull the data direct from EDGAR using XBRL.

There is also self-checking going on, which is great to see, as below:

And the final output in the Claude panel.

Great to see every numerical cell has a comment linking to the data source.

The end result, is that within a few minutes, I have two tab sheets on my Excel Workbook, one for the Income Statement and one for the Balance Sheet.

Great, saved me having to find and copy&paste the data.

And the comments for a numerical cell, take me to the SEC filing (see this link), so I can quickly verify a few of the numbers. (More on this later).

Next the balance sheet.

Financial Metrics

Now let’s ask for some calculations:

Create a new sheet for Financial Metrics that an Equity Analyst would expect

And in a couple of minutes I got a new sheet:

Impressive!

A good list of metrics, all with simples formulas based on the data in the Income Statement and Balance Sheet tabs.

After the first version I did have to prompt it to add EPS, which is fair enough as it then has to refer back to SEC filings for shares outstanding and EPS, which it added below the Income Statement.

Growth Model

Next, let’s try something more ambitious:

Can you create a growth model for the next 2 years, so add columns for 2026 and 2027 and provide me input cells to specify common assumptions for growth or margin that I can enter and based on expected values for these project the Consolidated Statements.

Claude asked for some clarification on assumptions, which I responded to and it explained it’s plan.

I could see progress as it inserted new data into the sheets, until I got the below.

Projections for 2026 and 2027, based on the assumptions in the blue cells which I could update.

Nice.

I am not an Equity Analyst and I expect neither are you the reader, still it should be clear how this can be an accelerator for anyone doing this type of work. That person could easily start from an existing workbook that has a template for the standard analysis they perform and have Claude update and customise it.

Data Assumptions

Now I did spot some data discrepancies when I first got back the Income Statement and Balance Sheet, but chose to plough on for the purposes of this blog and the fear that my Claude Pro plan would hits it’s daily token limit and stop me continuing.

But as it has not so far, I entered:

I need you to check the input data from SEC, as for example if I look at the Source SEC htm link, the Sales & Marketing figure for 2025 is 3,301,306 and your Income Sheet Cell B28 shows 3,009,527. A number of the interim rows have slightly different amounts but the totals and key ones are correct. Same with the Balance Sheet, so Cash and cash equivalent shows as 8.960,780 for 2025 while the source document I am looking at shows 9,033,681. What is going on?

Claude responded with:

And then after some more progress steps:

And

Oh dear!

It would have been better if I had been told that at the start!

And the apology.

To be fair, I had spotted the issue at the start, having learnt to always spot check data, but chose to continue and come back to this later.

So let’s copy & paste in the data from the source SEC document directly into the Claude panel (or I could have updated the Excel directly).

And the corrected Income Statement.

Of-course if I had access to a Data Connector that correctly loaded SEC Financial Statements that would be the best method and I am sure a number of these now exist as free or paid products.

That’s All for Today

A first look at Claude for Excel.

It is certainly very useful.

A time saver and highly capable.

Usual caveats on sourcing data apply.

It’s preferable to use Data Connectors and check.

I can see how it improves productivity.

And there is a lot more to try.

The natural language interface is very ease to use.

And quick to check the resulting Excel sheets and formulas.

I will definitely be using it again.

The real question is will I use regularly or whenever I use Excel?

Only time will tell.