Yapping at Excel: The $19 AI Tool That Actually Changes How You Work
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
We rarely dedicate an entire issue to a single tool. This week, we’re making an exception for something that isn’t even new… but something you probably haven’t tried yet simply because the barrier to entry was too high.
Claude in Excel has been around since last year. What changed is the price. Previously, you needed Anthropic’s Max plan at $100/month to access it, but now it’s available on the standard $19 Pro plan.
We’ve been using it since it came out. We think you should use it, too.
Claude for Excel is an add-in that brings Claude directly into your spreadsheet. Not as a separate window you copy-paste between. It is inside Excel, reading your tabs, understanding your formulas, and making changes in real time. The learning curve is surprisingly gentle: you don’t need to know how things work. It is enough if you can explain what you are trying to achieve, and it just... does it. Across multiple tabs. With formulas that actually work. (And, even better, you can use it with voice dictation—or as my wife likes to say it, I am “yapping at Excel” again. Think about the beauty and utter bizarreness of that workflow. — Torsten.)
Claude doesn’t make you love Excel. It removes the friction that made you avoid it.
Think about the tasks that drain your energy. Debugging a #REF! error that appeared after someone deleted a row three weeks ago. Building a campaign performance dashboard from scratch when your data lives across four different tabs. Writing nested IF statements for tiered commission calculations. Explaining to a colleague how the budget allocation formula works in a file they inherited.
These aren’t hard problems intellectually. They’re tedious problems. The gap between knowing what you want and actually making Excel do it—that’s where hours disappear.
We’ve started treating it like a junior analyst who happens to have perfect recall of every Excel function ever created. “Compare Q3 spend across these three tabs and flag anything that increased more than 20%.” Done in seconds. Not always perfectly—you still need to review what it produces—but fast enough that the dread associated with complex spreadsheet work starts to fade.
This changes who gets to be “good at Excel.”
For years, spreadsheet proficiency was a genuine skill differentiator. People built careers on being the one who could make Excel do things others couldn’t. That’s not disappearing entirely, but the barrier is dropping.
When you can describe what you want in words and have the tool figure out the implementation, the advantage shifts from “knowing the syntax” to “knowing what questions to ask.” That’s a different kind of expertise. Arguably a more valuable one.
And yes, there’s a bit of irony here.
We spend a lot of time talking about AI agents, autonomous workflows, and the future of work. Meanwhile, one of the highest-impact AI tools available right now is an add-in for software that’s been around since 1985. Excel isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t generate breathless LinkedIn posts. But it’s where the actual work happens—campaign tracking, budget allocation, pipeline forecasting, performance reporting. The spreadsheet is the unglamorous backbone of most marketing operations, and most of us have a complicated relationship with it. Some genuinely love the puzzle of a well-constructed model. Others feel a small knot in their stomach every time they open a file someone else built.
If you’ve been waiting for AI to meaningfully change how you work—not in theory, but in practice—this might be the place to start.
— Torsten and Peter
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