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Anthropic has updated its Claude AI model with new capabilities for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, marking a strategic move to expand its business footprint and potentially challenge Microsoft’s capabilities. Copilot Cowork recently launched – which Claude also partially enhances.
The updated plugins are available for Mac and Windows users on paid Claude plans starting today, March 11.
Anthropic is also expanding how companies can deploy the tools.
Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint can now be accessed through a Claude account or through an existing LLM gateway that points to Claude models on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or Microsoft Foundry.
This gives businesses more flexibility to use any add-ons within the cloud and compliance configurations they already have in place.
Shared context between Office applications
Starting March 11, paid users of Claude on Mac and Windows can access a new beta experience where Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint share the full context of a user’s conversation with the AI model between the two applications, without the need to manually copy and paste it.
That means Claude can transport information, instructions, and task history between an open spreadsheet and an open presentation in a single continuous session.
For example, Claude can write formulas to extract data from an Excel workbook and immediately apply it to a stylized PowerPoint slide in the same session.
“In practice: A financial analyst can ask Claude to pull comparable company financial data from an open workbook, create a business comparisons table in Excel, place the valuation summary on the presentation deck, and compose the email to the CEO, without switching tabs or re-explaining the data set at each step,” Anthropic said in a press release.
This is based on Anthropic’s. release of a Claude add-in for Excel in October 2025.
Repeatable workflows within applications
A core feature of this release is Skills, which allows teams to create and save repeatable workflows directly within the Excel and PowerPoint sidebars.
Instead of re-uploading references or re-requesting instructions, users can save standardized processes, such as specific variance analyzes or approved slide templates, as one-click actions available to the entire organization.
That could include workflows for recurring financial analyses, preparing presentations in the house’s preferred style, or executing common review steps that would otherwise have to be rewritten as prompts each time.
Anthropic said that every skill, whether personal or organization-wide, will work within the plugins in the same way that MCP connectors do.
“Workflows that once lived in one person’s head become one-click actions available to the entire organization,” the company said.
Anthropic distinguishes these skills from instructions, which allow users to set persistent preferences in add-ins, such as preferred number formatting in Excel or presentation writing rules in PowerPoint.
Anthropic also ships an initial set of preloaded skills, including:
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Excel: Audit models for formula errors, populate DCF and LBO templates, and clean up messy data ranges.
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PowerPoint: Build competitive landscape presentations and review investment banking materials to align the narrative.
Similarly, Microsoft new Copilot Cowork capability introduced Monday Enables business users to deploy agents to complete tasks in Microsoft applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.
The software giant openly stated that it was created in conjunction with Anthropic, which also launched its own standalone Claude Cowork app for Mac and Windows earlier this year, offering a way for Claude to access, edit, create and move information between files on a user’s computer, autonomously, based on the user’s instructions.
Previously, even with autonomous tools like the standalone Claude Cowork app, users often had to ask AI to complete tasks in separate steps for each app. Now, Claude maintains a continuous session that reads live data and writes formulas to both applications simultaneously.
Battle of the enterprise application agents
From the release of Claude Cowork Earlier this year, Anthropic has been making a case for being the chat and productivity platform of choice for businesses.
Competitors like Google, with its close partnership with Google Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google Docs, and Microsoft, with its continued leadership in the Office suite, can directly bring AI capabilities to users’ workflows.
Anthropic didn’t present the new Skills feature as equivalent to the more autonomous, agentic behavior that Microsoft now emphasizes with its own Copilot Cowork.
But the launch shows that Anthropic is steadily expanding beyond chatbot use cases and toward more structured, repeatable work within the applications that many business users already rely on.
Anthropic, through Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and the Claude family of models, has seeped into the systems of many organizations, using its high performance in coding and general knowledge benchmarks to better navigate a computer and complete knowledge work quickly, at scale, and with high quality.
OpenClaw, the open source AI agent that has taken the developer world by storm, It owes much of its existence to the Claude Code.
The result is another sign that the battle over enterprise AI is no longer just about which model performs best in benchmarks. It’s increasingly about which AI tools and systems companies rely on to do the real work in their existing applications, files, and workflows.
