[HN Gopher] Claude for Excel
___________________________________________________________________
Claude for Excel
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 384 points
Date : 2025-10-27 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.claude.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.claude.com)
| cube00 wrote:
| [flagged]
| sdsd wrote:
| Okay. But then you could say the same for a human, isn't your
| brain just a cloud of matter and electricity that just reacts
| to senses deterministically?
| cube00 wrote:
| > isn't your brain just a cloud of matter and electricity
| that just reacts to senses deterministically?
|
| LLMs are not deterministic.
|
| I'd argue over the short term humans are more deterministic.
| I ask a human the same question multiple times and I get the
| same answer. I ask an LLM and each answer could be very
| different depending on its "temperature".
| krzyk wrote:
| If you ask human the same question repeatedly, you'll get
| different answers. I think that at third you'll get "I
| already answered that" etc.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| We hardly react to things deterministically.
|
| But I agree with the sentiment. It seems it is more important
| than ever to agree on what it means to understand something.
| qwertox wrote:
| I'm having a bad day today. I'm 100% certain that today I'll
| react completely different to any tiny issue compared to how
| I did yesterday.
| NDizzle wrote:
| I mean - try clicking the CoPilot button and see what it can
| actually do. Last I checked, it told me it couldn't change any
| of the actual data itself, but it could give you suggestions.
| Low bar for excellence here.
| baal80spam wrote:
| OK then. Groks?
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| d--b wrote:
| Ok, they weren't confident enough to let the model actually edit
| the spreadsheet. Phew..
|
| Only a matter of time before someone does it though.
| cube00 wrote:
| When I think how easy I can misclick to stuff up a spreadsheet
| I can't begin to imagine all the subtle ways LLMs will screw
| them up.
|
| Unlike code where it's all on display, with all these formulas
| are hidden in each cell, you won't see the problem unless click
| on the cell so you'll have a hard time finding the cause.
| tln wrote:
| I wish Gemini could edit more in Google sheets and docs.
|
| Little stuff like splitting text more intelligently or
| following the formatting seen elsewhere would be very
| satisfying.
| password4321 wrote:
| How well does change tracking work in Excel... how hard would
| it be to review LLM changes?
|
| AFAIK there is no 'git for Excel to diff and undo', especially
| not built-in (aka 'for free' both cost-wise and add-ons/macros
| not allowed security-wise).
|
| My limited experience has been that it is difficult to keep
| LLMs from changing random things besides what they're asked to
| change, which could cause big problems if unattackable in
| Excel.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I thought there was track changes on all office products.
| Most Office documents are zip files of XML files and assets,
| so I'd imagine it would be possible to rollback changes.
| strange_quark wrote:
| Yet more evidence of the bubble burst being imminent. If any of
| these companies really had some almost-AGI system internally,
| they wouldn't be spending any effort making f'ing Excel plugins.
| Or at the very least, they'd be writing their own Excel because
| AI is so amazing at coding, right?
| qsort wrote:
| You wouldn't believe the amount of shit that runs on Excel.
| efields wrote:
| This. I work in Pharma. Excel and faxes.
| powvans wrote:
| Yes. I once interviewed a developer who's previous job was
| maintaining the .NET application that used an Excel sheet as
| the brain for decisions about where to drill for oil on the
| sea floor. No one understood what was in the Excel sheet. It
| was built by a geologist who was long gone. The engineering
| team understood the inputs and outputs. That's all they
| needed to know.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Years ago when I worked for an engineering consulting
| company we had to work with a similarly complex, opaque
| Excel spreadsheet from General Electric modeling the
| operation of a nuclear power plant in exacting detail.
|
| Same deal there -- the original author was a genius and was
| the only person who knew how it was set up or how it
| worked.
| cube00 wrote:
| I spotted a custom dialog in an Excel spreadsheet in a
| medical context the other day, I was horrified.
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| Sic
| strange_quark wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding me. This might be something
| somewhat useful, I don't know, and I'm not judging it based
| on that.
|
| What I'm saying is that if you really believed we were 2,
| maybe 3 years tops from AGI or the singularity or whatever
| you would spend 0 effort serving what already seems to be a
| domain that is already served by 3rd parties that are already
| using your models! An excel wrapper for an LLM isn't exactly
| cutting edge AI research.
|
| They're desperate to find something that someone will pay a
| meaningful amount of money for that even remotely justifies
| their valuation and continued investment.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| A program that can do excel for you _is_ almost AGI
| pton_xd wrote:
| The fine tuning will continue until we reach AGI.
| amlib wrote:
| The fine tuning will continue until we reach the torment
| nexus, at best
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The current valuations do not require AGI. They require
| products like this that will replace scores of people doing
| computer based grunt work. MSFT is worth $4 trillion off the
| back of enterprise productivity software, the AI labs just need
| some of that money.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You make a great point. Where is all of the complex
| applications? They haven't been able to create than own office
| suite or word processor or really anything aside from a
| halloween matching game in js. You would think we would have
| some complex application they can point to but nothing.
| mitjam wrote:
| Excel is living business knowlege stuck in private SharePoint
| Sites, tappimg into it might kick off a nice data flywheel not
| to speak of the nice TAM.
| jawns wrote:
| Gemini already has its hooks in Google Sheets, and to be honest,
| I've found it very helpful in constructing semi-complicated Excel
| formulas.
|
| Being able to select a few rows and then use plain language to
| describe what I want done is a time saver, even though I could
| probably muddle through the formulas if I needed to.
| break_the_bank wrote:
| I would recommend trying TabTabTab at https://tabtabtab.ai/
|
| It is an entire agent loop. You can ask it to build a multi
| sheet analysis of your favorite stock and it will. We are
| seeing a lot of early adopters use it for financial modeling,
| research automation, and internal reporting tasks that used to
| take hours.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Gemini integratoins to Google workspace feels like it's using
| Gemini 1.5 flash, it's so comically bad at understanding and
| generating
| gumby271 wrote:
| Last time I tried using Gemini in Google Sheets it hallucinated
| a bunch of fake data, then gave me a summary that included all
| that fake data. I'd given it a bunch of transaction data, and
| asked it to group the records into different categories for
| budgeting. When asking it to give the largest values in each
| category, all the values that came back were fake. I'm not sure
| I'd really trust it to touch a spreadsheet after that.
| genrader wrote:
| you should:
|
| -stop using the free plan -don't use gemini flash for these
| tasks -learn how to do things over time and know that all ai
| models have improved significantly every few months
| ipaddr wrote:
| Or not use it.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| I have had the opposite experience. I've never had Gemini give
| me something useful in sheets, and I'm not asking for
| complicated things. Like "group this data by day" or "give me
| p50 and p90"
| break_the_bank wrote:
| I forgot to add, you can try TabTabTab, without installing
| anything as well.
|
| To see something much more powerful on Google Sheets than
| Gemini for free, you can add "try@tabtabtab.ai" to your sheet,
| and make a comment tagging "try@tabtabtab.ai" and see it in
| action.
|
| If that is too much just go to ttt.new!
| soared wrote:
| It's interesting to me that this page talks a lot about
| "debugging models" etc. I would've expected (from the title) this
| to be going after the average excel user, similar to how chatgpt
| went after every day people.
|
| I would've expected "make a vlookup or pivot table that tells me
| x" or "make this data look good for a slide deck" to be easier
| problems to solve.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think this is aiming to be Claude Code for people who use
| Excel as a programming environment.
| layer8 wrote:
| The issue is that the average Excel user doesn't quite have the
| skills to validate and double-check the Excel formulas that
| Claude would produce, and to correct them if needed. It would
| be similar to a non-programmer vibe-coding an app. And that's
| really not what you want to happen for professionally used
| Excel sheets.
| soared wrote:
| IMO that is exactly what people want. At my work everyone
| uses LLMs constantly and the trade off of not perfect
| information is known. People double check it, etc, but the
| information search is so much faster even if it finds the
| right confluence but misquotes it, it still sends me the
| link.
|
| For easy spreadsheet stuff (which 80% of average white
| collars workers are doing when using excel) I'd imagine the
| same approach. Try to do what I want, and even if you're half
| wrong the good 50% is still worth it and a better starting
| point.
|
| Vibe coding an app is like vibe coding a "model in excel".
| Sure you could try, but most people just need to vibe code a
| pivot table
| extr wrote:
| I think actually Anthropic themselves are having trouble with
| imagining how this could be used. Coders think like coders -
| they are imagining the primary use case being managing large
| Excel sheets that are like big programs. In reality most Excel
| worksheets are more like tiny, one-off programs. More like
| scripts than applications. AI is very very good at scripts.
| burkaman wrote:
| I'm excited to see what national disasters will be caused by
| auto-generated Excel sheets that nobody on the planet
| understands. A few selections from past HN threads to prime your
| imagination:
|
| Thousands of unreported COVID cases:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247
|
| Thousands of errors in genetics research papers:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950
|
| Wrong winner announced in national election:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197280
|
| Countries across the world implement counter-productive economic
| austerity programs:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Especially combined with the dynamic array formulas that have
| recently been added (LET, LAMBDA etc). You can have much more
| going on within each cell now. Think whole temporary data
| structures. The "evaluate formula" dialog doesn't quite cut it
| anymore for debugging.
| malthaus wrote:
| from my experience in the corporate world, i'd trust an excel
| generated / checked by an LLM more than i would one that has
| been organically grown over years in a big corporation where
| nobody ever checks or even can check anything because its one
| big growing pile of technical debt people just accept as
| working
| whalesalad wrote:
| I just want Claude inside of Metabase.
| adamfeldman wrote:
| https://www.metabase.com/features/metabot-ai
| asdev wrote:
| George Hotz said there's 5 tiers of AI systems, Tier 1 - Data
| centers, Tier 2 - fabs, Tier 3 - chip makers, Tier 4 - frontier
| labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers. He said Tier 4 is going to eat all
| the value of Tier 5, and that Tier 5 is worthless. It's looking
| like that's going to be the case
| matsur wrote:
| People were saying the same thing about AWS vs SaaS ("AWS
| wrappers") a decade ago and none of that came to pass. Same
| will be true here.
| tln wrote:
| Claude is a model wrapper, no?
| piperswe wrote:
| Anthropic is a frontier lab, and Claude is a frontier model
| extr wrote:
| George Hotz says a lot of things. I think he's directionally
| correct but you could apply this argument to tech as a whole.
| Even outside of AI, there are plenty of niches where domain-
| specific solutions matter quite a bit but are too small for the
| big players to focus on.
| rudedogg wrote:
| Tier 5 requires domain expertise until we reach AGI or
| something very different from the latest LLMs.
|
| I don't think the frontier labs have the bandwidth or domain
| knowledge (or dare I say skills) to do tier 5 tasks well. Even
| their chat UIs leave a lot to be desired and that should be
| their core competency.
| benatkin wrote:
| Interesting. I found a reference to this in a tweet [1], and it
| looks to be a podcast. While I'm not extremely knowledgable.
| I'd put it like this: Tier 1 - fabs, Tier 2 - chip makers, Tier
| 3 - data centers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model
| wrappers
|
| However I would think more of elite data centers rather than
| commodity data centers. That's because I see Tier 4 being
| deeply involved in their data centers and thinking of buying
| the chips to feed their data centers. I wouldn't be so inclined
| to throw in my opinion immediately if I found an article
| showing this ordering of the tiers, but being a tweet of a
| podcast it might have just been a rough draft.
|
| 1: https://x.com/tbpn/status/1935072881425400016
| mediaman wrote:
| That is a common refrain by people who have no domain expertise
| in anything outside of tech.
|
| Spend a few years in an insurance company, a manufacturing
| plant, or a hospital, and then the assertion that the frontier
| labs will figure it out appears patently absurd. (After all, it
| takes humans years to understand just a part of these
| institutions, and they have good-functioning memory.)
|
| This belief that tier 5 is useless is itself a tell of a
| vulnerability: the LLMs are advancing fastest in domain-
| expertise-free generalized technical knowledge; if you have no
| domain expertise outside of tech, you are most vulnerable to
| their march of capability, and it is those with domain
| expertise who will rely increasingly less on those who have
| nothing to offer but generalized technical knowledge.
| asdev wrote:
| yeah but if Anthropic/OpenAI dedicate resources to gaining
| domain expertise then any tier 5 is dead in the water. For
| example, they recently hired a bunch of finance professionals
| to make specialized models for financial modeling. Any
| startup in that space will be wiped out
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I dont think the claim is exactly that tier 5 is useless more
| that tier 5 synergizes so well with tier 4 that all the
| popular tier 5 products will eventually be made by the tier 4
| companies.
| mitjam wrote:
| Andrew Ng argumented in 2023
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p248yoa3oE ) that the
| underlying tiers depend on the app tier's success.
|
| That OpenAI is now apparantly striving to become the next big
| app layer company could hint at George Hotz being right but
| only if the bets work out. I'm glad that there is competition
| on the frontier labs tier.
| extr wrote:
| What is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge,
| huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar
| work. Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets
| would be a big productivity boost for many employees.
|
| My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from
| the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large
| percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal
| system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other
| internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a
| recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but
| these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as
| these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet
| 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate
| or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
| cube00 wrote:
| I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work
| you need in a spreadsheet.
|
| It's one thing to fudge the language in a report summary, it
| can be subjective, however numbers are not subjective. It's
| widely known LLMs are terrible at even basic maths.
|
| Even Google's own AI summary admits it which I was surprised
| at, marketing won't be happy.
|
| _Yes, it is true that LLMs are often bad at math because they
| don 't "understand" it as a logical system but rather process
| it as text, relying on pattern recognition from their training
| data._
| extr wrote:
| Seems like you're very confused about what this work
| typically entails. The job of these employees is not mental
| arithmatic. It's closer to:
|
| - Log in to the internal system that handles customer
| policies
|
| - Find all policies that were bound in the last 30 days
|
| - Log in to the internal system that manages customer
| payments
|
| - Verify that for all policies bound, there exists a
| corresponding payment that roughly matches the premium.
|
| - Flag any divergences above X% for accounting/finance to
| follow up on.
|
| Practically this involves munging a few CSVs, maybe typing in
| a few things, setting up some XLOOKUPs, IF formulas,
| conditional formatting, etc.
|
| Will AI replace the entire job? No...but that's not the goal.
| Does it have to be perfect? Also no...the existing employees
| performing this work are also not perfect, and in fact
| sometimes their accuracy is quite poor.
| Ntrails wrote:
| Checking someone elses spreadsheet is a fucking nightmare.
| If your company has extremely good standards it's less
| miserable because at least the formatting etc will be
| consistent...
|
| The one thing LLMs should consistently do is ensure that
| formatting is correct. Which will help greatly in the
| checking process. But no, I generally don't trust them to
| do sensible things with basic formulation. Not a week ago
| GPT 5 got confused whether a plus or a minus was necessary
| in a basic question of "I'm 323 days old, when is my
| birthday?"
| xmprt wrote:
| I think you have a misunderstanding of the types of
| things that LLMs are good at. Yes you're 100% right that
| they can't do math. Yet they're quite proficient at basic
| coding. Most Excel work is similar to basic coding so I
| think this is an area where they might actually be pretty
| well suited.
|
| My concern would be more with how to check the work (ie,
| make sure that the formulas are correct and no columns
| are missed) because Excel hides all that. Unlike code,
| there's no easy way to generate the diff of a spreadsheet
| or rely on Git history. But that's different from the
| concerns that you have.
| collingreen wrote:
| I've built spreadsheet diff tools on Google sheets
| multiple times. As the needs grows I think we will see
| diffs and commits and review tools reach customers
| break_the_bank wrote:
| hey Collin! I am working on an AI agent on Google Sheets,
| I am curious if any of your designs are out in the
| public. We are trying to re-think how diffs should look
| like and want to make something nicer than what we
| currently have, so curious.
| collingreen wrote:
| Hi! Nothing public nor generic enough to be a good
| building block. I found myself often frustrated by the
| tools that came out of the box but I believe better apis
| could make this slightly easier to solve.
|
| The UX of spreadsheet diffs is a hard one to solve
| because of how weird the calculation loops are and how
| complicated the relationship between fields might be.
|
| I've never tried to solve this for a real end user before
| in a generic way - all my past work here was for internal
| ability to audit changes and rollback catastrophes. I
| took a lot of shortcuts by knowing which cells are input
| data vs various steps of calculations -- maybe part of
| your ux is being able to define that on a sheet by sheet
| basis? Then you could show how different data (same
| formulas) changed outputs or how different formulas (same
| data) did differently?
|
| Spreadsheets are basically weird app platforms at this
| point so you might not be able to create a single
| experience that is both deep and generic. On the other
| hand maybe treating it as an app is the unlock? Get your
| AI to noodle on what the whole thing is for, then show
| diff between before and after stable states (after all
| calculation loops stabilize or are killed) side by side
| with actual diffs of actual formulas? I feel like Id want
| to see a diff as a live final spreadsheet and be able to
| click on changed cells and see up the chain of their
| calculations to the ancestors that were modified.
|
| Fun problem that sounds extremely complicated. Good luck
| distilling it!
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| proficient != near-flawless.
|
| > Most Excel work is similar to basic coding so I think
| this is an area where they might actually be pretty well
| suited.
|
| This is a hot take. One I'm not sure many would agree
| with.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Yes you're 100% right that they can't do math.
|
| The model ought to be calling out to some sort of tool to
| do the math--effectively writing code, which it can do.
| I'm surprised the major LLM frontends aren't always doing
| this by now.
| mapt wrote:
| So do it in basic code where numbering your line G53
| instead of G$53 doesn't crash a mass transit network
| because somebody's algorithm forgot to order enough fuel
| this month.
| runarberg wrote:
| > The one thing LLMs should consistently do is ensure
| that formatting is correct.
|
| In JavaScript (and I assume most other programming
| languages) this is the job of static analysis tools (like
| eslint, prettier, typescript, etc.). I'm not aware of any
| LLM based tools which performs static analysis with as
| good a results as the traditional tools. Is static
| analysis not a thing in the spreadsheet world? Are there
| the tools which do static analysis on spreadsheets
| subpar, or offer some disadvantage not seen in other
| programming languages? And if so, are LLMs any better?
| eric-burel wrote:
| Just use a normal static analysis tool and shove the
| result to an LLM. I believe Anthropic properly figured
| that agents are the key, in addition to models, contrary
| to OpenAI that is run by a psycho that only believes in
| training the bigger model.
| koliber wrote:
| Maybe LLMs will enable a new type of work in
| spreadsheets. Just like in coding we have PR reviews,
| with an LLM it should be possible to do a spreadsheet
| review. Ask the LLM to try to understand the intent and
| point out places where the spreadsheet deviates from the
| intent. Also ask the LLM to narrate the spreadsheet so it
| can be understood.
| Insanity wrote:
| That first condition "try to understand the intent" is
| where it could go wrong. Maybe it thinks the spreadsheet
| aligns with the intent, but it misunderstood the intent.
|
| LLMs are a lossy validation, and while they work
| sometimes, when they fail they usually do so 'silently'.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Maybe we need some kind of method, framework to develop
| intent. Most of things that go wrong in knowledge working
| are down to lack of common understanding of intent.
| lossolo wrote:
| Last time, I gave claude an invoice and asked it to change
| one item on it, it did so nicely and gave me the new
| invoice. Good thing I noticed it had also changed the bank
| account number..
|
| The more complicated the spreadsheet and the more
| dependencies it has, the greater the room for error. These
| are probabilistic machines. You can use them, I use them
| all the time for different things, but you need to treat
| them like employees you can't even trust to copy a bank
| account number correctly.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| We've tried to gently use them to automate some of our
| report generation and PDF->Invoice workflows and it's a
| nightmare of silent changes and absence of logic.. basic
| things like specifically telling it "debits need to match
| credits" and "balance sheets need to balance" that are
| ignored.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Yeah, asking llm to edit one specific thing in a large or
| complex document/ codebase is like those repeated "give
| me the exact same image" gifs. It's fundamentally a
| statistical model so the only thing we can be _certain_
| of is that _it's not_. It might get the desired change
| 100% correct but it's only gonna get the entire document
| 99 5%
| onion2k wrote:
| Something that Claude Sonnet does when you use it to code
| is write scripts to test whether or not something is
| working. If it does that for Excel (e.g. some form of
| verification) it should be fine.
|
| Besides, using AI is an exercise in a "trust but verify"
| approach to getting work done. If you asked a junior to
| do the task you'd check their output. Same goes for AI.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| Sysadmin of a small company. I get asked pretty often to
| help with a pivot table, vlookup, or just general excel
| functions (and smartsheet, these users LOVE smartsheet)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed, in a small enough org, the sysadmin/technologist
| becomes support of last resort for all the things.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _these users LOVE smartsheet_
|
| I hate smartsheet...
|
| Excel or R. (Or more often, regex followed by pen and
| paper followed by more regex.)
| AvAn12 wrote:
| > "Does it have to be perfect?"
|
| Actually, yes. This kind of management reporting is either
| (1) going to end up in the books and records of the company
| - big trouble if things have to be restated in the future
| or (2) support important decisions by leadership -- who
| will be very much less than happy if analysis turns out to
| have been wrong.
|
| A lot of what ties up the time of business analysts is
| ticking and tying everything to ensure that mistakes are
| not made and that analytics and interpretations are
| consistent from one period to the next. The math and
| queries are simple - the details and correctness are hard.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| There is another aspect to this kind of activity.
|
| Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging
| some aspects of internal accounting data for a time
| period. Basically sitting on credits or debits to some
| accounts for a period of weeks. The tacit knowledge to
| know when to sit on a transaction and when to action it
| is generally not written down in formal terms.
|
| I'm not sure how these shenanigans will translate into an
| ai driven system.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| That's the kind of thing that can get a company into a
| lot of trouble with its auditors and shareholders. Not
| that I am offering accounting advice of course. And yeah,
| one can not "blame" and ai system or try to ai-wash any
| dodgy practices.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or
| lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a
| time period.
|
| This worked famously well for Enron.
| extr wrote:
| Speak for yourself and your own use cases. There are a
| huge diversity of workflows with which to apply
| automation in any medium to large business. They all have
| differing needs. Many excel workflows I'm personally
| familiar with already incoporate a "human review" step.
| Telling a business leader that they can now jump straight
| to that step, even if it requires 2x human review, with
| AI doing all of the most tediuous and low-stakes prework,
| is a clear win.
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| >Speak for yourself and your own use cases
|
| Take your own advice.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Is this not belligerently ignoring the fact that this
| work is already done imperfectly? I can't tell you how
| many serious errors I've caught in just a short time of
| automating the generation of complex spreadsheets from
| financial data. All of them had already been checked by
| multiple analysts, and all of them contained serious
| errors (in different places!)
| next_xibalba wrote:
| The use cases for spreadsheets are much more diverse than
| that. In my experience, spreadsheets just as often used for
| calculation. Many of them do require high accuracy, rely on
| determinism, and necessitate the understanding of maths
| ranging from basic arithmetic to statistics and engineering
| formulas. Financial models, for example, must be built up
| from ground truth and need to always use the right formulas
| with the right inputs to generate meaningful outputs.
|
| I have personally worked with spreadsheet based financial
| models that use 100k+ rows x dozens of columns and involve
| 1000s of formulas that transform those data into the
| desired outputs. There was very little tolerance for
| mistakes.
|
| That said, humans, working in these use cases, make
| mistakes >0% of the time. The question I often have with
| the incorporation of AI into human workflows is, will we
| eventually come to accept a certain level of error from
| them in the way we do for humans?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| >Does it have to be perfect? Also no.
|
| Yeah, but it could be perfect, why are there humans in the
| loop at all? That is all just math!
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. I get all my perfectly deterministic
| work output from human beings!
| goatlover wrote:
| If only we had created some device that could perform
| deterministic calculations and then wrote software that
| made it easy for humans to use such calculations.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok but humans are idiots, if only we could make some sort
| of Alternate Idiot, a non-human but every bit as
| generally stupid as humans are! This A.I would be able to
| do every stupid thing humans did with the device that
| performed deterministic calculations only many times
| faster!
| baconbrand wrote:
| Yes and when the AI did that all the stupid humans could
| accept its output without question. This would save the
| humans a lot of work and thought and personal
| responsibility for any mistakes! See also Israel's
| Lavender for an exciting example of this in action.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| I don't trust humans to do the kind of precise deterministic
| work you need in a spreadsheet!
| baconbrand wrote:
| Right, we shouldn't use humans or LLMs. We should use
| regular deterministic computer programs.
|
| For cases where that is not available, we should use a
| human and never an LLM.
| extr wrote:
| "regular deterministic computer programs" - otherwise
| known as the SUM function in Microsoft Excel
| davidpolberger wrote:
| I like to use Claude Code to write deterministic computer
| programs for me, which then perform the actual work. It
| saves a lot of time.
|
| I had a big backlog of "nice to have scripts" I wanted to
| write for years, but couldn't find the time and energy
| for. A couple of months after I started using Claude
| Code, most of them exist.
| baconbrand wrote:
| That's great and the only legitimate use case here. I
| suspect Microsoft will not try to limit customers to just
| writing scripts and will instead allow and perhaps even
| encourage them to let the AI go ham on a bunch of raw
| data with no intermediary code that could be reviewed.
|
| Just a suspicion.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Sure, but this isn't requiring that the LLM do any math. The
| LLM is writing formulas and code to do the math. They are
| very good at that. And like any automated system you need to
| review the work.
| causal wrote:
| Exactly, and if it can be done in a way that helps users
| better understand their own spreadsheets (which are often
| extremely complex codebases in a single file!) then this
| could be a huge use case for Claude.
| bg24 wrote:
| "I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic
| work" => I think LLM is not doing the precise arithmetic. It
| is the agent with lots of knowledge (skills) and tools.
| Precise deterministic work is done by tools (deterministic
| code). Skills brings domain knowledge and how to sequence a
| task. Agent executes it. LLM predicts the next token.
| zarmin wrote:
| >I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic
| work
|
| not just in a spreadsheet, any kind of deterministic work at
| all.
|
| find me a reliable way around this. i don't think there is
| one. mcp/functions are a band aid and not consistent enough
| when precision is important.
|
| after almost three years of using LLMs, i have not found a
| single case where i didn't have to review its output, which
| takes as long or longer than doing it by hand.
|
| ML/AI is not my domain, so my knowledge is not deep nor
| technical. this is just my experience. do we need a new
| architecture to solve these problems?
| baconbrand wrote:
| ML/AI is not my domain but you don't have to get all that
| technical to understand that LLMs run on probability. We
| need a new architecture to solve these problems.
| chpatrick wrote:
| They're not great at arithmetic but at abstract mathematics
| and numerical coding they're pretty good actually.
| mhh__ wrote:
| If LLMs can replace mathematica for me when I'm doing affine
| yield curve calculations they can do a DCF for some banker
| idiots
| sdeframond wrote:
| > I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic
| work you need in a spreadsheet.
|
| Rightly so! But LLMs can still make you faster. Just don't
| expect _too much_ from it.
| mbreese wrote:
| I don't see the issue so much as the deterministic precision
| of an LLM, but the lack of observability of spreadsheets.
| Just looking at two different spreadsheets, it's impossible
| to see what changes were made. It's not like programming
| where you can run a `git diff` to see what changes an LLM
| agent made to a source code file. Or even a word processing
| document where the text changes are clear.
|
| Spreadsheets work because the user sees the results of
| complex interconnected values and calculations. For the user,
| that complexity is hidden away and left in the background.
| The user just sees the results.
|
| This would be a nightmare for most users to validate what
| changes an LLM made to a spreadsheet. There could be
| fundamental changes to a formula that could easily be hidden.
|
| For me, that the concern with spreadsheets and LLMs - which
| is just as much a concern with spreadsheets themselves. Try
| collaborating with someone on a spreadsheet for modeling and
| you'll know how frustrating it can be to try and figure out
| what changes were made.
| informal007 wrote:
| you might trust when the precision is extremely high and
| others agree with that.
|
| high precision is possible because they can realize that by
| multiple cross validations
| prisonguard wrote:
| ChatGPT is actively being used as a calculator.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| _> I don 't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise
| deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet._
|
| I was thinking along the same lines, but I could not
| articulate as well as you did.
|
| Spreadsheet work is deterministic; LLM output is
| probabilistic. The two should be distinguished.
|
| Still, its a productivity boost, which is always good.
| Kiro wrote:
| Most real-world spreadsheets I've worked with were fragile
| and sloppy, not precise and deterministic. Programmers always
| get shocked when they realize how many important things are
| built on extremely messy spreadsheets, and that people simply
| accept it. They rather just spend human hours correcting
| discrepancies than trying to build something maintainable.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Usually this is very hard because the tasks and the job
| often subtly shifts in somewhat unpredictable and
| unforeseen ways and there is no neat clean abstraction that
| you can just implement as an application. Too
| hererogeneous, too messy, too many exceptions. If you
| develop some clean elegant solution, next week there will
| be something that your shiny app doesn't allow and they'd
| have to submit a feature request or whatever.
|
| In Excel, it's possible to just ad hoc adjust things and
| make it up as you go. It's not clean but very adaptable and
| flexible.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| LLMs are just a tool, though. Humans still have to verify
| them, like with very other tools out there
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Eh, yes. In theory. In practice, and this is what I have
| experienced personally, bosses seem to think that you now
| have interns so you should be able to do 5x the output..
| guess what that means. No verification or rubber stamp.
| brookst wrote:
| Do you trust humans to be precise and deterministic, or even
| to be especially good at math?
|
| This is talking about applying LLMs to formula creation and
| references, which they are actually pretty good at.
| Definitely not about replacing the spreadsheet's calculation
| engine.
| onion2k wrote:
| _It 's widely known LLMs are terrible at even basic maths._
|
| Claude for Excel isn't doing maths. It's doing Excel. If the
| llm is bad at maths then teaching it to use a tool that's
| good at maths seems sensible.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| My concern is that my insurance company will reject a claim, or
| worse, because of something an LLM did to a spreadsheet.
|
| Now, granted, that can also happen because Alex fat-fingered
| something in a cell, but that's something that's much easier to
| track down and reverse.
| manquer wrote:
| They already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at higher
| numbers than before .
|
| Privatized insurance will always find a way to pay out less
| if they could get away with it . It is just nature of having
| the trifecta of profit motive , socialized risk and light
| regulation .
| philipallstar wrote:
| > It is just nature of having the trifecta of profit motive
| , socialized risk and light regulation.
|
| It's the nature of everything. They agree to pay you for
| something. It's nothing specific to "profit motive" in the
| sense you mean it.
| manquer wrote:
| I should have been clearer - profit maximization above
| all else as long it is mostly legal. Neither profit or
| profit maximization at all cost is nature of everything .
|
| There are many other entity types from unions[1],
| cooperatives , public sector companies , quasi government
| entities, PBC, non profits that all offer insurance and
| can occasionally do it well.
|
| We even have some in the US and don't think it is
| communism even - like the FDIC or things like social
| security/ unemployment insurance.
|
| At some level government and taxation itself is nothing
| but insurance ? We agree to paying taxes to mitigate
| against variety of risks including foreign invasion or
| smaller things like getting robbed on the street.
|
| [1] Historically worker collectives or unions self-
| organized to socialize the risks of both major work
| ending injuries or death.
|
| Ancient to modern armies operate on because of this
| insurance the two ingredients that made them not
| mercenaries - a form of long term insurance benefit
| (education, pension, land etc) or family members in the
| event of death and sovereign immunity for their actions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at
| higher numbers than before_
|
| Source?
| nartho wrote:
| Haven't risk based models been a thing for the last 15-20
| years ?
| keernan wrote:
| >>They already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at
| higher numbers than before .
|
| That's a feature, not a bug.
| elpakal wrote:
| This is a great application of this quote. Insurance
| providers have 0 incentive to make their AI "good" at
| processing claims, in fact it's easy to see how "bad" AI
| can lead to a justification to deny more claims.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| The question is how you define good. They surely want the
| Ai to be good in the sense that it rejects all claims
| that they think can get away with rejecting. But it
| should not reject those where rejection likely results in
| litigation and losing and having to pay damages.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Couldn't they accomplish the same thing by rejecting a
| certain percentage of claims totally at random?
| manquer wrote:
| That would be illegal though, the goal is do this legally
| after all.
|
| We also have to remember all claims aren't equal. i.e.
| some claims end up being way costlier than others. You
| can achieve similar % margin outcomes by putting a ton of
| friction like, preconditions, multiple appeals processes
| and prior authorization for prior authorization, reviews
| by administrative doctors who have no expertise in the
| field being reviewed don't have to disclose their
| identity and so and on.
|
| While U.S. system is most extreme or evolved, it is not
| unique, it is what you get when you end up privatize
| insurance any country with private insurance has some
| lighter version of this and is on the same journey .
|
| Not that public health system or insurance a la NHS in UK
| or like Germany work, they are underfunded, mismanaged
| with long times in months to see a specialist and so on.
|
| We have to choose our poison - unless you are rich of
| course, then the U.S. system is by far the best, people
| travel to the U.S. to get the kind of care that is not
| possible anywhere else.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Why does saying "AI did it" make it legal, if the outcome
| is the same?
| nxobject wrote:
| > While U.S. system is most extreme or evolved, it is not
| unique, it is what you get when you end up privatize
| insurance any country with private insurance has some
| lighter version of this and is on the same journey .
|
| I disagree with the statement that healthcare insurance
| is predominantly privatized in the US: Medicare and
| Medicaid, at least in 2023, outspent private plans for
| healthcare spending by about ~10% [1]; this is before
| accounting for government subsidies for private plans.
| And boy, does America have a very unique relationship
| with these programs.
|
| https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-
| spe...
| smithkl42 wrote:
| If you think that insurance companies have "light
| regulation", I shudder to think of what "heavy regulation"
| would look like. (Source: I'm the CTO at an insurance
| company.)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They have too much regulation, and too little auditing
| (at least in the managed healthcare business).
| nxobject wrote:
| I agree, _and_ I can see where it comes from (at least at
| the state level). The cycle is: bad trend happens that
| has deep root causes (let 's say PE buying rural
| hospitals because of reduced Medicaid/Medicare
| reimbursements); legislators (rightfully) say "this
| shouldn't happen", but don't have the ability to address
| the deep root causes so they simply regulate healthcare
| M&As - now you have a bandaid on a problem that's going
| to pop up elsewhere.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I mean even in the simple stuff like denying payment for
| healthcare that should have been covered. CMS will come
| by and out a handful of cases, out of millions, every few
| years.
|
| So obviously the company that prioritizes accuracy of
| coverage decisions by spending money on extra labor to
| audit itself is wasting money. Which means insureds have
| to waste more time getting the payment for healthcare
| they need.
| manquer wrote:
| Light did not mean to imply quantity of paperwork you
| have to do, rather are you allowed to do the things you
| want to do as a company.
|
| More compliance or reporting requirements usually tend to
| favor the larger existing players who can afford to do it
| and that is also used to make the life difficult and
| reject more claims for the end user.
|
| It is kind of thing that keeps you and me busy, major
| investors don't care about it all, the cost of the
| compliance or the lack is not more than a rounding number
| in the balance, the fines or penalties are puny and
| laughable.
|
| The enormous profits year on year for decades now, the
| amount of consolidation allowed in the industry show that
| the industry is able to do mostly what they want pretty
| much, that is what I meant by light regulation.
| smithkl42 wrote:
| I'm not sure we're looking at the same industry. Overall,
| insurance company profit margins are in the single
| digits, usually low single digits - and in many segments,
| they're frequently not profitable at all. To take one
| example, 2024 was the first profitable year for
| homeowners insurance companies since 2019, and even then,
| the segment's entire profit margin was 0.3% (not 3% -
| 0.3%).
|
| https://riskandinsurance.com/us-pc-insurance-industry-
| posts-...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's an accounting 101 thing to use all tricks in the
| book to reduce the reported profit, to avoid paying taxes
| on that profit.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Wait until a company has to restate earnings because of a bug
| in a Claudified Excel spreadsheet.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > What is with the negativity in these comments?
|
| Some people - normal people - understand the difference between
| the holistic experience of a mathematically informed opinion
| and an actual model.
|
| It's just that normal people always wanted the holistic
| experience of an answer. Hardly anyone wants a right answer.
| They have an answer in their heads, and they want a defensible
| journey to that answer. That is the purpose of Excel in 95% of
| places it is used.
|
| Lately people have been calling this "syncophancy." This was
| always the problem. Sycophancy is the product.
|
| Claude Excel is leaning deeply into this garbage.
| extr wrote:
| It seems like to me the answer is moreso "People on HN are so
| far removed from the real use cases for this kind of
| automation they simply have no idea what they're talking
| about".
| genrader wrote:
| This is so correct it hurts
| intended wrote:
| I used to live in excel.
|
| The issue isn't in creating a new monstrosity in excel.
|
| The issue is the poor SoB who has to spelunk through the damn
| thing to figure out what it does.
|
| Excel is the sweet spot of just enough to be useful, capable
| enough to be extensible, yet gated enough to ensure everyone
| doesn't auto run foreign macros (or whatever horror is more
| appropriate).
|
| In the simplest terms - it's not excel, it's the business
| logic. If an excel file works, it's because theres someone who
| "gets" it in the firm.
| extr wrote:
| I used to live in Excel too. I've trudged through plenty of
| awful worksheets. The output I've seen from AI is actually
| more neatly organized than most of what I used to receive in
| outlook. Most of that wasn't hyper-sophisticated cap table
| analyses. It was analysis from a Jr Analyst or line employee
| trying to combine a few different data sources to get some
| signal on how XYZ function of the business was performing. AI
| automation is perfectly suitable for this.
| intended wrote:
| How?
|
| Neat formatting didn't save any model from having the wrong
| formula pasted in.
|
| Being neat was never a substitute for being well rested, or
| sufficiently caffeinated.
|
| Have you seen how AI functions in the hands of someone who
| isn't a domain expert? I've used it for things I had no
| idea about, like Astro+ web dev. User ignorance was
| magnified spectacularly.
|
| This is going to have Jr Analysts dumping well formatted
| junk in email boxes within a month.
| gedy wrote:
| It's actually really cool. I will say that "spreadsheets"
| remain a bandaid over dysfunctional UIs, processes, etc and
| engineering spends a lot of time enabling these bandaids vs
| someone just saying "I need to see number X" and not "a BI
| analytics data in a realtime spreadsheet!", etc.
| gadders wrote:
| Yeah, this could be a pretty big deal. Not everyone is an excel
| expert, but nearly everyone finds themselves having to work
| with data in excel at some time or other.
| hbarka wrote:
| What does scaffolding of spreadsheets mean? I see the term
| scaffolding frequently in the context of AI-related articles
| and not familiar with this method and I'm hesitant to ask an
| LLM.
| Rudybega wrote:
| Scaffolding typically just refers to a larger state machine
| style control flow governing an agent's behavior and the
| suite of external tools it has access to.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > How teams use Claude for Excel
|
| Who are these teams that can get value from Anthropic? One MCP
| and my context window is used up and Claude tells me to start a
| new chat.
| BuildItBusk wrote:
| I have to admit that my first thought was "April's fool". But
| you are right. It makes a lot of sense (if they can get it to
| work well). Not only is Excel the world's biggest "programming
| language". It's probably also one of the most unintuitive ways
| to program.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Why unintuitive?
| baq wrote:
| If you exclude macros with IO it's actually the most popular
| purely functional programming language (no quotes) on the
| planet by far.
| tokai wrote:
| Whats with claiming negativity when most of the comments here
| are positive?
| protonbob wrote:
| > but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping
| block as these integrations mature.
|
| Perhaps this is part of the negativity? This is a bad thing for
| the middle class.
| jpadkins wrote:
| in the short run. In the long run, productivity gains
| benefit* all of us (in a functional market economy).
|
| *material benefit. In terms of spirit and purpose, the older
| I get the more I think maybe the Amish are on to something.
| Work gives our lives purpose, and the closer the work is to
| our core needs, the better it feels. Labor saving so that
| most of us are just entertaining each other on social
| networks may lead to a worse society (but hey, our material
| needs are met!)
| informal007 wrote:
| agree with you, but it cannot be stopped. development of
| technology always makes wealth distribution more centralized
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think excel is a dead end. LLM agents will probably greatly
| prefer SQL, sqlite, and Python instead of bulky made-for-
| regular-folks excel.
|
| Versatility and efficiency explode while human usability tanks,
| but who cares at that point?
| informal007 wrote:
| Database might be the future, but viable solution on excel
| are evidence to prove that it works
| informal007 wrote:
| this will push the development of open source models.
|
| people think of privacy at first regards of data, local
| deployment of open source models are the first choice for them
| threetonesun wrote:
| Probably because many people here are software developers, and
| wrapping spreadsheets in deterministic logic and a consistent
| UI covers... most software use cases.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Having wrangled many spreadsheets personally, and worked with
| CFOs who use them to run small-ish businesses, and all the way
| up to one of top 3 brokerage houses world-wide using them to
| model complex fixed income instruments... this is a disaster
| waiting to happen.
|
| Spreadsheet UI is already a nightmare. The formula editing and
| relationship visioning is not there at all. Mistakes are
| rampant in spreadsheets, even my own carefully curated ones.
|
| Claude is not going to improve this. It is going to make it
| far, far worse with subtle and not so subtle hallucinations
| happening left and right.
|
| The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on
| entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works
| pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or
| emulating someone's voice.
|
| It is not a basis for getting correct spreadsheets that show
| what you want to show. I don't want my spreadsheet correctness
| to start from a random seed. I want it to spring from first
| principles.
| noosphr wrote:
| My first job out of uni was building a spreadsheet infra as
| code version control system after a Windows update made an
| eight year old spreadsheet go haywire and lose $10m in a
| afternoon.
|
| Spreadsheets are already a disaster.
| daveguy wrote:
| > Spreadsheets are already a disaster.
|
| Yeah, that's what OP said. Now add a bunch of random
| hallucinations hidden inside formulas inside cells.
|
| If they really have a good spreadsheet solution they've
| either fixed the spreadsheet UI issues or the LLM
| hallucination issues or both. My guess is neither.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets
|
| To me, the case for LLMs is strongest not because LLMs are so
| unusually accurate and awesome, but because if human
| performance were put on trial in aggregate, it would be found
| wanting.
|
| Humans already do a mediocre job of spreadsheets, so I don't
| think it is a given that Claude will make more mistakes than
| humans do.
| lionkor wrote:
| But isn't this only fine as long someone who knows what
| they are doing has oversight and can fix issues when they
| arise and Claude gets stuck?
|
| Once we all forget how to write SUM(A:A), will we just
| invent a new kind of spreadsheet once Claude gets stuck?
|
| Or in other words; what's the end game here? LLMs clearly
| cannot be left alone to do anything properly, so what's the
| end game of making people not learn anything anymore?
| extr wrote:
| Is this just a feeling you have or is this downstream of
| actual use cases you've applied AI to observed and measured
| reliability on?
| lionkor wrote:
| Not OP but using LLMs in any professional setting, like
| programming, editing or writing technical specifications,
| OP is correct.
|
| Without extensive promoting and injectimg my own knowledge
| and experience, LLMs generate absolute unusable garbage (on
| average). Anyone who disagrees very likely is not someone
| who would produce good quality work by themselves (on
| average). That's not a clever quip; that's a very sad
| reality. SO MANY people cannot be bothered to learn
| anything if they can help it.
| extr wrote:
| I would completely disagree. I use LLMs daily for coding.
| They are quite far from AGI and it does not appear they
| are replacing Senior or Staff Engineers any time soon.
| But they are incredible machines that are perfectly
| capable of performing some economically valuable tasks in
| a fraction of the time it would have taken a human. If
| you deny this your head is in the sand.
| lionkor wrote:
| Capable, yeah, but not reliable, that's my point. They
| can one shot fantastic code, or they can one shot the
| code I then have to review and pull my hair out over for
| a week, because it's such crap (and the person who pushed
| it is my boss, for example, so I can't just tell him to
| try again).
|
| That's not consistent.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You can ask your boss to submit PRs using Codex's "try 5
| variations of the same task and select the one you like
| most though
| mbesto wrote:
| Not the parent poster, but this is pretty much the
| foundation of LLMs. They are by their nature probabilistic,
| not deterministic. This is precisely what the parent is
| referring to.
| sothatsit wrote:
| I don't think tools like Claude are there yet, but I already
| trust GPT-5 Pro to be more diligent about catching bugs in
| software than me, even when I am trying to be very careful. I
| expect even just using these tools to help review existing
| Excel spreadsheets could lead to a significant boost in
| quality if software is any guide (and Excel spreadsheets seem
| even worse than software when it comes to errors).
|
| That said, Claude is still quite behind GPT-5 in its ability
| to review code, and so I'm not sure how much to expect from
| Sonnet 4.5 in this new domain. OpenAI could probably do
| better.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > I already trust GPT-5 Pro to be more diligent about
| catching bugs in software than me
|
| I don't know if you ever considered yourself a software
| engineer, but if you ever did, you no longer are.
| scoot wrote:
| Or you could, you know, read the article before commenting to
| see the limited scope of this integration?
|
| Anyway, Google has already integrated Gemini into Sheets, and
| recently added direct spreadsheet editing capability so your
| comment was disproven before you even wrote it
| silenced_trope wrote:
| > The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on
| entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This
| works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan
| fiction or emulating someone's voice.
|
| I think you need to turn down the temperature a little bit.
| This could be a beneficial change.
| scosman wrote:
| > all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to
| emulate human creativity
|
| Those are tuneable parameters. Turn down the temperature and
| top_p if you don't want the creativity.
|
| > Claude is not going to improve this.
|
| We can measure models vs humans and figure this out.
|
| To your own point, humans already make "rampant" mistakes.
| With models, we can scale inference time compute to catch and
| eliminate mistakes, for example: run 6x independent
| validators using different methodologies.
|
| One-shot financial models are a bad idea, but properly
| designed systems can probably match or beat humans pretty
| quickly.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| > Turn down the temperature and top_p if you don't want the
| creativity.
|
| This also reduces accuracy in real terms. The randomness is
| used to jump out of local minima.
| sally_glance wrote:
| Having AI create the spreadsheet you want is totally
| possible, just like generating bash scripts works well. But
| to get good results, there needs to be some documentation
| describing all the hidden relationships and nasty workarounds
| first.
|
| Don't try to make LLMs generate results or numbers, that's
| bound to fail in any case. But they're okay to generate a
| starting point for automations (like Excel sheets with lots
| of formulas and macros), given they get access to the same
| context we have in our heads.
| mountainriver wrote:
| You can do it cursor style
| lacker wrote:
| It's like the negativity whenever a post talks about hiring or
| firing. A lot of people are afraid that they are going to lose
| their jobs to AI.
| pluc wrote:
| Anthropic now has all your company's data, and all you saved
| was the cost of one human minus however much they charge for
| this. The good news is it can't have your data _again_! So
| starting from the 163rd-165th person you fire, you start to see
| a good return and all you 've sacrificed is exactitude,
| precision, judgement, customer service and a little bit of
| public perception!
| mapt wrote:
| The vast majority of people in business and science are using
| spreadsheets for complex algorithmic things they weren't really
| designed for, and we find a metric fuckton of errors in the
| sheets when you actually bother looking auditing them, mistakes
| which are not at all obvious without troubleshooting by...
| manually checking each and every cell & cell relation, peering
| through parentheses, following references. It's a nightmare to
| troubleshoot.
|
| LLMs specialize in making up plausible things with a minimum of
| human effort, but their downside is that they're very good at
| making up plausible things which are covertly erroneous. It's a
| nightmare to troubleshoot.
|
| There is already an abject inability to provision the labor to
| verify Excel reasoning when it's composed by humans.
|
| I'm dead certain that Claude will be able to produce plausibly
| correct spreadsheets. How important is accuracy to you? How
| life-critical is the end result? What are your odds, with the
| current auditing workflow?
|
| Okay! Now! Half of the users just got laid off because
| management thinks Claude is Good Enough. How about now?
| practice9 wrote:
| LLMs are getting quite good at reviewing the results and
| implementations, though
| lionkor wrote:
| Not really, they're only as good as their context and they
| do miss and forget important things. It doesn't matter how
| often, because they do, and they will tell you with 100%
| confidence and with every synonym of "sure" that they
| caught it all. That's the issue.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| HN has a base of strong anti-AI bias, I assume is partially
| motivated by insecurity over being replaced, losing their jobs
| or having missed the boat on the AI.
| extr wrote:
| Based on the comments here, it's surprisingly anything in
| society works at all. I didn't realize the bar was
| "everything perfect every time, perfectly flexible and
| adaptable". What a joy some of these folks must be to work
| with, answering every new technology with endless reasons why
| it's worthless and will never work.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I think perhaps you underestimate how antithetical the
| current batch of LLM AI's is to what most programmers
| strive for every day, and what we want from our tools. Its
| not about losing our job, its about "correctness". (or as
| said below - deterministic)
|
| In a lot of jobs, particularly in creative industries, or
| marketing, media and writing, the definition of a job well
| done is a fairly grey area. I think AI will be mostly
| disruptive in these areas.
|
| But in programming there is a hard minimum of quality.
| Given a set of inputs, does the program return the correct
| answer or not? When you ask it what 2+2, do you get 4?
|
| When you ask AI anything, it might be right 50% of the
| time, or 70% of the time, but you can't blindly trust the
| answer. A lot of us just find that not very useful.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Modt of the time when using AI I have a lot more than 1
| shot to ensure everything is correct.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| HN has an obsession with quality too, which has merit, but is
| often economically irrelevant.
|
| When US-East-1 failed, lots of people talked about how the
| lesson was cloud agnosticism and multi cloud architecture.
| The practical economic lesson for most is that if US-East-1
| fails, nobody will get mad at you. Cloud failure is viewed as
| an act of god.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > HN has a base of strong anti-AI bias
|
| Quite the opposite, actually. You can always find five
| stories on the front page about some AI product or feature.
| Meanwhile, you have people like yourself who convince
| themselves that any pushback is done by people who just don't
| see the true value of it yet and that they're about to miss
| out!! Some kind of attempt at spreading FOMO, I guess.
| lionkor wrote:
| I use AI every day. Without oversight, it does not work well.
|
| If it doesn't work well, I will do it myself, because I care
| that things are done well.
|
| None of this is me being scared of being replaced; quite the
| opposite. I'm one of the last generations of programmers who
| learned how to program and can debug and fix the mess your
| LLM leaves behind when you forgot to add "make sure it's a
| clean design and works" to the prompt.
|
| Okay, that's maybe hyperbole, but sadly only a little bit.
| LLMs make me better at my job, they don't replace me.
| sothatsit wrote:
| I really don't think this is accurate. I think the median
| opinion here is to be suspicious of claims made about AI, and
| I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. But I also
| regularly see posts talking about AI positively (e.g.
| simonw), or talking about it negatively. I think this is a
| good thing, it is nice to have a diversity of opinions on a
| technology. It's a feature, not a bug.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It is bad in a very specific sense, but I did not see any other
| comments express the bad parts instead of focusing merely on
| the accuracy part ( which is an issue, but not the issue ):
|
| - this opens up ridiculous flood of data that would otherwise
| be semi-private to one company providing this service - this
| works well small data sets, but will choke on ones it will need
| to divvy up into chunks inviting interesting ( and yet unknown
| ) errors
|
| There is a real benefit to being able to 'talk to data', but
| anyone who has seen corporate culture up close and personal
| knows exactly where it will end.
|
| edit: an i saying all this as as person, who actually likes
| llms.
| mceoin wrote:
| I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15%
| of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect
| hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in
| progress is a massive time save and value add.
|
| The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and
| "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".
|
| This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a
| Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a
| huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation
| (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet
| intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder"
| problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.
|
| For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have
| problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred
| interface for analysis, project management and lightweight
| database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet
| problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so
| it'a a balance.
|
| Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next
| release!
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value
| add.
|
| Based on the history of digitalization of businesses from the
| 1980s onwards, the spreadsheets will just balloon in number
| and size and there will be more rules and more procedures and
| more forms and reports to file until the efficiency gains are
| neutralized (or almost neutralized).
| trollbridge wrote:
| The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they tend to be
| accounts for the accumulation of technical debt, which is an
| area that AI tools are not yet very good at retiring, but very
| good at making additional withdrawals from.
| burnte wrote:
| > What is with the negativity in these comments?
|
| A lot of us have seen the effects of AI tools in the hands of
| people who don't understand how or why to use the tools. I've
| already seen AI use/misuse get two people fired. One was a
| line-of-business employee who relied on output without ever
| checking it, got herself into a pretty deep hole in 3 weeks.
| Another was a C suite person who tried to run an AI tool
| development project and wasted double their salary in 3 months,
| nothing to show for it but the bill, fired.
|
| In both cases the person did not understand the limits of the
| tools and kept replacing facts with their desires and their own
| misunderstanding of AI. The C suite person even tried to tell a
| vendor they were wrong about their own product because "I found
| out from AI".
|
| AI right now is fireworks. It's great when you know how to use
| it, but if you half-ass it you'll blow your fingers off very
| easily.
| martinald wrote:
| This is going to be massive if it works as well as I suspect it
| might.
|
| I think many software engineers overlook how many companies have
| huge (billion dollar) processes run through Excel.
|
| It's much less about 'greenfield' new excel sheets and much more
| about fixing/improving existing ones. If it works as well as
| Claude Code works for code, then it will get pretty crazy
| adoption I suspect (unless Microsoft beats them to it).
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > This is going to be massive if it works as well as I suspect
| it might.
|
| Until Microsoft does its anti-competitive thing and find a way
| to break this in the file format, because this is exactly what
| copilot in excel does.
|
| That said, Copilot in Excel is pretty much hot garbage still so
| anything will be better than that.
| NotMichaelBay wrote:
| What do you mean, what is copilot in excel doing exactly?
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I think many software engineers overlook how many companies
| have huge (billion dollar) processes run through Excel.
|
| So they can fire the two dudes that take care of it, lose 15
| years of in house knowledge to save 200k a year and cry in a
| few months when their magic tool shits the bed ?
|
| Massive win indeed
| bsenftner wrote:
| If the company is half baked, those "two dudes" will become
| indispensable beyond belief. They are the ones that
| understand how Excel works far deeper, and paired with Claude
| for Excel they become far far more valuable.
| Balgair wrote:
| At my org it more that these AI tools finally allow the
| employees to get through things at all. The deadlines are
| getting met for the first time, maybe ever. We can at last
| get to the projects that will make the company money
| instead of chasing ghosts from 2021. The burn down charts
| are warm now.
| warthog wrote:
| Tough day to be an AI Excel add-in startup
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| That seems to be true for any startup that offers a wrapper to
| existing AIs rather than an AI on their own. The lucky ones
| might be bought but many if not most of them will perish trying
| to compete with companies that actually create AI models and
| companies large enough to integrate their own wrappers.
| warthog wrote:
| Actually just wrote about this:
| https://aimode.substack.com/p/openai-is-below-above-and-
| arou...
|
| not sure if it binary like that but as startups we will
| probably collect the scraps leftover indeed instead
| 8note wrote:
| its a great time for your ai excel add-in to start getting
| acquired by a claude competitor though
| NotMichaelBay wrote:
| Not OpenAI, though, because they already gave $14M to an AI
| Excel add-in startup (Endex)
| mitjam wrote:
| Ask Rosie is actually shutting down right now:
| https://www.askrosie.ai/
|
| I would love to learn more about their challenges as I have
| been working on an Excel AI add-in for quite some time and have
| followed Ask Rosie from almost their start.
|
| That they now gone through the whole cycle worries me I'm too
| slow as a solo building on the side in these fast paced times.
| intended wrote:
| As an inveterate Excel lover, I can just sense the blinding pain
| wafting off the legions of accountants, associates, seniors, and
| tech people who keep the machine spirits placated.
|
| lies, damn lies, statistics, and then Excel deciding cell data
| types.
| garyclarke27 wrote:
| I guess Claude maybe useful for finding errors in large Excel
| Workbooks. May also help beginners to learn the more complex
| Excel functions (which are still pretty easy). But if you are
| proficient at building Excel models I don't see any benefit.
| Excel already has a superb very efficient UI for entering
| formulas, ranges, tables, data sources etc I'm sceptical that a
| different UI especially a text based one can improve on this.
| proteal wrote:
| I understand the sentiment about a skilled user not needing
| this, but I think having a little buddy that I can use to
| offload some menial tasks would be helpful for me to iterate
| through my models more efficiently; even if the AI is not
| perfect. As a highly skilled excel user, I admit the software
| has terrible ergonomics. It would be a productivity boon for me
| if an AI can help me stay focused on model design vs model
| implementation.
| intended wrote:
| For some reason, I find that these tools are TERRIBLE at
| helping someone learn. I suspect because turning one on,
| results in turning the problem solving part of ones brain off.
|
| Its obviously not the same experience for everyone. ( If you
| are one of those energized while working in a chat window, you
| might be in a minority - given what we see from the ongoing
| massacre of brains in education. )
|
| Paraphrasing something I read here "people don't use ChatGPT to
| do learn more, they use it to study less".
|
| Maybe some folk would be better off.
| mattas wrote:
| I'm not excited about having LLMs generate spreadsheets or
| formulas. But, I think LLMs could be particularly useful in
| helping me find inconsistent formulas or errors that are
| challenging to identify. Especially in larger, complex
| spreadsheets touched by multiple people over the course of
| months.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| For once in my life, I actually had a delightful interaction
| with an LLM last week. I was changing some text in an Excel
| sheet in a very progromatic way that could have easily been
| done with the regex functions in Excel. But I'm not really
| great with regex, and it was only 15 or so cells, so I was
| content to just do it manually. After three or four cells,
| Copilot figured out what I was doing and suggested the rest of
| the changes for me.
|
| This is what I want AI to do, not generate wrong answers and
| hallucinate girlfriends.
| bambax wrote:
| One approach is to produce read-only data in BI tools: users
| are free to export anything they want and make their own
| spreadsheets, but those are for their own use only. Reference
| data is produced every day by a central, controlled process and
| cannot in any circumstance be modified by the end user.
|
| I have implemented this a couple of times and not only does it
| work well, it tends to be fairly well accepted. People need
| spreadsheets to work on them, but generally they kind of hate
| sending those around via email. Having a reference source of
| data is welcomed.
| gedy wrote:
| Cool but now companies POs will be like "you must add the Excel
| export for all the user data!" and when asked why, will basically
| be "so I can do this roundabout query of data for some number in
| a spreadsheet using AI (instead of just putting the number or
| chart directly in the product with a simple db call)"
| racl101 wrote:
| This could be huge! Very exciting!
| michaelmarkell wrote:
| IMO, a real solution here has to be hybrid, not full LLM, because
| these sheets can be massive and have very complicated structures.
| You want to be able to use the LLM to identify / map column
| headers, while using non-LLM tool calling to run Excel operations
| like SUMIFs or VLOOKUPs. One of the most important traits in
| these systems is consistency with slight variation in file
| layout, as so much Excel work involves consolidating /
| reconciling between reports made on a quarterly basis or produced
| by a variety of sources, with different reporting structures.
|
| Disclosure: My company builds ingestion pipelines for large
| multi-tab Excel files, PDFs, and CSVs.
| dcre wrote:
| That's exactly what they're doing.
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...
| levocardia wrote:
| "This won't work because (something obvious that engineers at
| Anthropic clearly thought of already)"
| michaelmarkell wrote:
| Not really. Take for example:
|
| item, date, price
|
| abc, 01/01/2023, $30
|
| cde, 02/01/2023, $40
|
| ... 100k rows ...
|
| subtotal. $1000
|
| def, 03/01,2023, $20
|
| "Hey Claude, what's the total from this file? > grep for
| headers > "Ah, I see column 3 is the price value" >
| SUM(C2:C) -> $2020 > "Great! I found your total!"
|
| If you can find me an example of tech that can solve this
| at scale on large, diverse Excel formats, then I'll
| concede, but I haven't found something actually trustworthy
| for important data sets
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| So more or less like what AI has been doing for the last couple
| of years when it comes to writing code?
| pdyc wrote:
| I have just launched a product (easyanalytica.com) to create
| dashboards from spreadsheets, and Excel is on my to-do list of
| formats to be supported. However, I'm having second thoughts.
| Although, from the description, it seems like it would be more
| helpful on the modeling side rather than the presentation side. I
| guess I'll have to wait until it's publicly available
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Why second thoughts?
| pdyc wrote:
| everyone will use claude if they support it why would they
| use my product. so i will have to find some other angle to
| differentiate.
| causal wrote:
| Seems everyone is speculating features instead of just reading
| TFA which does in fact list features:
|
| - Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models
| instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets,
| or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes
| cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
|
| - Test scenarios without breaking formulas: Update assumptions
| across your entire model while preserving all dependencies. Test
| different scenarios quickly--Claude highlights every change with
| explanations for full transparency.
|
| - Debug and fix errors: Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular
| reference errors to their source in seconds. Claude explains what
| went wrong and how to fix it without disrupting the rest of your
| model.
|
| - Build models or fill existing templates: Create draft financial
| models from scratch based on your requirements. Or populate
| existing templates with fresh data while maintaining all formulas
| and structure.
| Balgair wrote:
| If this can reliably deal with the REF, VALUE, and NA problems,
| it'll be worth it for that alone.
|
| Oh and deal with dates before 1900.
|
| Excel is a gift from God if you stay in its lane. If you ever
| so slightly deviate, not even the Devil can help you.
|
| But maybe, juuuuust maybe, AI can?
| libraryatnight wrote:
| "not even Devil can help you.
|
| But maybe, juuuuust maybe, AI can?"
|
| Bold assumption that the devil and AI aren't aligned ;)
| beefnugs wrote:
| Also people complaining about AI inaccuracy are just technical
| people that like precision. The vast majority of the world is
| people who dont give a damn about accuracy or even correctness.
| They just want to appear as if not completely useless to people
| that could potentially affect their salary
| lionkor wrote:
| "just" technical people who like precision are the reason we
| are here, typing this, and why lots of parts of our world is
| pretty cool and comfortable. I wouldn't say that's useless
| and "just" some people when it clearly is generating
| unmistakable value
| serf wrote:
| Anthropic is in a weird place for me right now. They're growing
| fast , creating little projects that i'd love to try, but their
| customer service was so bad for me as a max subscriber that I set
| an ethical boundary for myself to avoid their services until such
| point that it appears that they care about their customers
| whatsoever.
|
| I keep searching for a sign, but everyone I talk to has horror
| stories. It sucks as a technologist that just wants to play with
| the thing; oh well.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Best way to think of it is this: Right now you are not the
| customer. Investors are.
|
| The money people pay in monthly fees to Anthropic for even the
| top Max sub likely doesn't come closer to covering the energy &
| infrastructure costs for running the system.
|
| You can prove this to yourself by just trying to cost out what
| it takes to build the hardware capable of running a model of
| this size at this speed and running it locally. It's tens of
| thousands of dollars just to build the hardware, not even
| considering the energy bills.
|
| So I imagine the goal right now is to pull in a mass audience
| and prove the model, to get people hooked, to get management
| and talent at software firms pushing these tools.
|
| And I guess there's some in management and the investment
| community that thinks this will come with huge labour cost
| reductions but I think they may be dreaming.
|
| ... And then.. I guess... jack the price up? Or wait for
| Moore's Law?
|
| So it's not a surprise to me they're not jumping to try and
| service individual subscribers who are paying probably a
| fraction of what it costs them to the run the service.
|
| I dunno, I got sick of paying the price for Max and I now use
| the Claude Code tool but redirect it to DeepSeek's API and use
| their (inferior but still tolerable) model via API. It's
| probably 1/4 the cost for about 3/4 the product. It's actually
| amazing how much of the intelligence is built into the tool
| itself instead of just the model. It's often incredibly hard to
| tell the difference bertween DeepSeek output and what I got
| from Sonnet 4 or Sonnet 4.5
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| You are bang on.
|
| Every AI company right now (except Google Meta and Microsoft)
| has their valuations based on the expectation of a future
| monopoly on AGI. None of their business models today or in
| the foreseeable horizon are even positive let alone world-
| dominating. The continued funding rounds are all apparently
| based on expectation of becoming the sole player.
|
| The continuing advancement of open source / open weights
| models keeps me from being a believer.
|
| I've placed my bet and feel secure where it is.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I've been playing around with local LLMs in Ollama, just for
| fun. I have an RTX 4080 Super, a Ryzen 5950X with 32 threads,
| and 64 GB of system memory. A very good computer, but
| decidedly consumer-level hardware.
|
| I have primarily been using the 120b gpt-oss model. It's
| definitely worse than Claude and GPT-5, but not by, like, an
| order of magnitude or anything. It's also clearly better than
| ChatGPT was when it first came out. Text generates a bit
| slowly, but it's perfectly usable.
|
| So it doesn't seem so unreasonable to me that costs could
| come down in a few years?
| consumer451 wrote:
| > I keep searching for a sign, but everyone I talk to has
| horror stories. It sucks as a technologist that just wants to
| play with the thing; oh well.
|
| The reason that Claude Code doesn't have an IDE is because ~"we
| think the IDE will obsolete in a year, so it seemed like a
| waste of time to create one."
|
| Noam Shazeer said on a Dwarkesh podcast that he stopped
| cleaning his garage, because a robot will be able to do it very
| soon.
|
| If you are operating under the beliefs these folks have, then
| things like IDEs, cleaning up, and customer service are stupid
| annoyances that will become obsolete very soon.
|
| _To be clear, I have huge respect for everyone mentioned
| above, especially Noam._
| chairmansteve wrote:
| "Noam Shazeer said on a Dwarkesh podcast that he stopped
| cleaning his garage, because a robot will be able to do it
| very soon".
|
| How much is the robot going to cost in a year? 100k? 200k?
| Not mass market pricing for sure.
|
| Meanwhile, today he could pay someone $1000 to clean his
| garage.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I would do it for free, just to answer the question of what
| does a genius of his caliber have in his garage? Probably
| the same stuff most people do, but it would still be
| interesting.
|
| I don't think the point was about having a clean space, it
| was in response to a question along the lines of: when do
| you think we will achieve AGI?
| Thrymr wrote:
| > Noam Shazeer said on a Dwarkesh podcast that he stopped
| cleaning his garage, because a robot will be able to do it
| very soon.
|
| We all come up with excuses for why we haven't done a chore,
| but some of us need to sound a bit more plausible to other
| members of the household than that.
|
| It would get about the same reaction as "I'm not going to
| wash the dishes tonight, the rapture is tomorrow."
| consumer451 wrote:
| I want to make it very clear that this was a lighthearted
| response from Noam to the "AGI timeline" question.
|
| Noam does not do a lot of interviews, and I really hope
| that stuff like my dumb comment does not prevent him from
| doing more in the future. We could all learn a lot from
| him. I am not sure that everyone understands everything
| that he has given us.
| redhale wrote:
| What happened? I'm a Max subscriber and I'd like to know what
| to look out for!
| informal007 wrote:
| bad customer service comes from low priority. I think anthropic
| prioritize new growth point over small number of customer's
| feedback, that's why they publish new product, features so
| frequently, there are so much possible potential opportunities
| for them to focus
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Hope it's better than what MS is currently shipping as AI.
| Everything I try to do something, the response is "sorry, I can't
| do this".
| smithkl42 wrote:
| Copilot is getting better - I'm getting fewer of those than I
| used to - but it's still significantly more stupid than other
| agents, even when in theory it's using the same model.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| R.I.P. global economy
| fudged71 wrote:
| Interesting their X post mentions "pre-built Agent Skills" but
| it's not on the webpage. I wonder if they will give you the
| ability to edit/add/delete Skills, that would be phenomenal.
|
| Edit: found it on their other blog post
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...
| luccasiau wrote:
| You can add and customize skills in claude.ai and other
| surfaces
| Havoc wrote:
| They can try, but doubt anyone serious will adopt it.
|
| Tried integrating chatgpt into my finance job to see how far I
| can get. Mega jikes...millions of dollars of hallucinated
| mistakes.
|
| Worse you don't have the same tight feedback loop you've got in
| programming that'll tell you when something is wrong. Compile
| errors, unit tests etc. You basically need to walk through
| everything it did to figure out what's real and what's
| hallucinations. Basically fails silently. If they roll that out
| at scale in the financial system...interesting times ahead.
|
| Still presumably there is something around spreadsheets it'll be
| able to do - the spreadsheet equivalent of boilerplate code
| whatever that may be
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| I'm bad with spread sheets so maybe this is trivial but having
| an llm tell me how to connect my sheet to whatever data I'm
| using at the moment and it coming up with a link or sql query
| or both has allowed me to quickly pull in data where I'd
| normally eyeball it and move on or worst case do it partially
| manually if really important.
|
| It's like one off scripts in a sense? I'm not doing complex
| formulas I just need to know how I can pull data into a sheet
| and then I'll bucketize or graph it myself.
|
| Again probably because I'm not the most adept user but it has
| definitely been a positive use case for me.
|
| I suspect my use case is pretty boilerplatey :)
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| This could be invaluable for reverse engineering complex
| workbooks with multiple data sources and hundreds or thousands of
| formulas.
| pumnikol wrote:
| If it has a concept of data sources and can digest them, sure.
| Anecdotally, most issues with Excel at my job are caused by
| data sources being renamed, moved or reformatted, by broken
| logins, or by insufficient access rights.
| keernan wrote:
| If AI turns out to be the powerhouse it is claimed to be, AI's
| impact will be corporations replacing corporate dependencies upon
| 'Excel projects' created by self-taught assistants to department
| managers.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| As I was reading through the post, and the comments here, and
| pondering my own many hours with these tools, I was suddenly
| reminded of one of my favorite studio C sketches: An Unfortunate
| Fortune
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-psoWdSpo
|
| Curious, if others see the connection. :D
| davidpolberger wrote:
| I'm a co-founder of Calcapp, an app builder for formula-driven
| apps using Excel-like formulas. I spent a couple of days using
| Claude Code to build 20 new templates for us, and I was blown
| away. It was able to one-shot most apps, generating competent,
| intricate apps from having looked at a sample JSON file I put
| together. I briefly told it about extensions we had made to Excel
| functions (including lambdas for FILTER, named sort type enums
| for XMATCH, etc), and it picked those up immediately.
|
| At one point, it generated a verbose formula and mentioned, off-
| handedly, that it would have been prettier had Calcapp supported
| LET. "It does!", I replied, "and as an extension, you can use :=
| instead of , to separate names and values!") and it promptly
| rewrote it using our extended syntax, producing a sleek formula.
|
| These templates were for various verticals, like real estate,
| financial planning and retail, and I would have been hard-pressed
| to produce them without Claude's domain knowledge. And I did it
| in a weekend! Well, "we" did it in a weekend.
|
| So this development doesn't really surprise me. I'm sure that
| Claude will be right at home in Excel, and I have already thought
| about how great it would be if Claude Code found a permanent home
| in our app designer. I'm concerned about the cost, though, so I'm
| holding off for now. But it does seem unfair that I get to use
| Claude to write apps with Calcapp, while our customers don't get
| that privilege.
|
| (I wrote more about integrating Claude Code here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662229)
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Dumb question, but is this Claude for Excel the.. app? The
| webapp? Does it work on Google sheets? etc
|
| There are quite a few spreadsheet apps out there, just curious
| what their implementation is or how it's implemented to work with
| multiple apps.
|
| I always find Excel (and the Office ecosystem) confusing heh.
| p_ing wrote:
| Modern Excel add-ins work in desktop Windows, macOS, and web.
| They're just a bit of XML that Excel looks at to call a
| whatever web endpoint is defined in the XML.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| How is this different from the existing Claude skill, that uses a
| prompt and pandas to edit an Excel file?
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/document-skil...
| shooker435 wrote:
| This isn't built for Excel users who use Github and Claude
| Skills, it's built for Excel users who would run away from Git
| commands.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The Claude skill I linked to is built into the Claude desktop
| client. You just attach an Excel file to your chat and ask
| away.
|
| I linked to the skill prompt just to more clearly explain the
| approach that's currently available to all Claude users.
|
| It requires zero familiarity with git or command line.
| mamonster wrote:
| On the one hand, most financial companies have a lot of processes
| in Excel that could be made better with something like Claude.
|
| Banking secrecy laws + customer identifying data + AI tool = No
| bueno.
| grim_io wrote:
| If this works very well and reliable, it might not kill
| programming as such, but it might put a lot of small businesses
| who do custom software for other small businesses out of work.
|
| The HN bubble might not realize the implications.
| surume wrote:
| Checkmate, Altman
| kaspermarstal wrote:
| So cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel.
| Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come
| from the ability to use AI _as_ a formula. For example,
| =PROMPT("Classify user feedback as positive, neutral or
| negative", A1). This would enable normal people (non-programmers)
| to fire off thousands of prompts at once and automate workflows
| like programmers do (disclaimer: I am the author of Cellm that
| does exactly this). Combined with Excel's built-in functions for
| deterministic work, Claude could really kill the whole copy-
| pasting data in and out of chat windows for bulk-processing data.
| btown wrote:
| From the signup form mentioning Private Equity / Venture Capital,
| Hedge Fund, Investment Banking... this seems squarely aimed at
| financial modeling. Which is really, really cool.
|
| I've worked alongside sell-side investment bankers in a prior
| startup, and so much of the work is in taking a messy set of
| statements from a company, understanding the underlying
| assumptions, and building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding,
| 3-statement models that not only adhere to standard conventions
| (perhaps best introed by
| https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/build-integrated-3-... )
| but also are highly customized for different assumptions that can
| range from seasonality to sensitivity to creative deal
| structures.
|
| It is quite common for people to pull many, many all-nighters to
| try to tweak these models in response to a senior banker or a
| client having an idea! And one might argue there are way too many
| similar-looking numbers to keep a human banker from
| "hallucinating," much less an LLM.
|
| But fundamentally, a 3-statement model and all its build-sheets
| are a dependency graph with loosely connected human-readable
| labels, and that means you can write tools that let an LLM crawl
| that dependency graph in a reliable and semantically meaningful
| way. And _that_ lets you build really cool things, really fast.
|
| I'm of the opinion that giving small companies the ability to
| present their finances to investors, the same way Fortune 500
| companies hire _armies_ of bankers to do, is vital to a healthy
| economy, and to giving Main Street the best possible chance to
| succeed and grow. This is a massive step in the right direction.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Presenting your finances to investors via a tool designed for
| generation of plausible looking data is fraud.
| ceh123 wrote:
| Presenting false data to investors is fraud, doesn't matter
| how it was generated. In fact, humans are quite good at
| "generating plausible looking data", doesn't mean human
| generated spreadsheets are fraud.
|
| On the other hand, presenting truthful data to investors is
| distinctly not fraud, and this again does not depend on the
| generation method.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| If humans "generate plausible looking data" despite any
| processes to ensure data quality they've likely engaged in
| willful fraud.
|
| An LLM doing so needn't even be willful from the author's
| part. We're going to see issues with forecasts/slide decks
| full of inaccuracies that are hard to review.
| lionkor wrote:
| > doesn't matter how it was generated
|
| is there precedent for this supposed ruling?
| Kydlaw wrote:
| You might have accidentally described what accounting is.
| btown wrote:
| Completely understand the sentiment, but it doesn't apply
| here, because what's being generated are formulas!
|
| Standardized 3-statement models in Excel are designed to be
| auditable, with or without AI, because (to only slightly
| simplify) every cell is either a blue input (which must come
| from standard exports of the company's accounting books,
| other auditable inventory/CRM/etc. data, or a visible
| hardcoded constant), or a black formula that cannot have
| hardcoded values, and must be simple.
|
| If every buyer can audit, with tools like this, that the
| formulas match the verbal semantics of the model, there's
| even less incentive than there is now to fudge the formula
| level. (And with Wall Street conventions, there's nowhere to
| hide a prompt injection, because you're supposed to keep
| every formula to only a few characters, and use breakout
| "build" rows that can themselves be visually audited.)
|
| And sure, you could conceivably use any AI tool to generate a
| plausible list of numbers at the input level, but that was
| equally easy, and equally dependent on context to be
| fraudulent or not, ever since that famous Excel 1990 elevator
| commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO31qFmi9A&t=61s
|
| At the end of the day, the difference between "they want to
| see this growth, let's fudge it" and "they want to see this
| growth, let's calculate the exact metrics we need to hit to
| make that happen, and be transparent about how that's
| feasible" has always been a matter of trust, not technology.
|
| Tech like this means that people who want to do things the
| right way can do it as quickly as people who wanted to play
| loose with the numbers, and that's an equalizer that's on the
| right side of history.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I use excel but not for financial modelling, I'll use it
| mainecoder wrote:
| Yeah now tell the Auditors that the financial spreadsheet we have
| here has AI touching it left and right. "I did not cook the books
| I promise it is the AI that made our financials seem better than
| they actually are trust me bro!", said Joe from Accounting.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| The thing really missing from multi-megabyte excel sheets of
| business critical carnage was a non-deterministic rewrite tool.
| It'll interact excitingly with the industry standard of no
| automated testing whatsoever.
|
| I 100% believe generative AI can change a spreadsheet. Turn the
| xslx into text, mutate that, turn it back into an xslx, throw it
| away if it didn't parse at all. The result will look pretty
| similar to the original too, since spreadsheets are great at
| showing immediately local context and nothing else.
|
| Also, we've done a pretty good job of training people that
| chatgpt works great, so there's good reason for them to expect
| claude for excel to work great too.
|
| I'd really like the results of this to be considered negligence
| with non-survivable fines for the reckless stupidity, but more
| likely, it'll be seen as an act of god. Like all the other broken
| shit in the IT world.
| patife wrote:
| Fodasse a Rows e pelo menos 3x melhor
| supermalvo wrote:
| 100%
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I wonder if this will be more/less useful than what we have with
| AI in software development.
|
| There's a lot less to understand than a whole codebase.
|
| I don't do spreadsheets very often, but I can emphasize with
| tracking down "Trace #REF!, #VALUE!, and circular reference
| errors to their source in seconds." I once hit something like
| that, and I found it a lot harder to trace a typical compiler
| error.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Been working with Claude Code lately and been pretty impressed.
| If this works as well could be a nice add on. Its probably a
| smart market to enter as Excel is essentially everywhere.
|
| Just like Claude Code allows 1 dev to potentially do the work of
| 2 or 3, I could see this allowing 1 accountant or operations
| person to do the work of 2 or 3. Financial savings but human cost
| NumberCruncher wrote:
| On the first glance this seems to be a very bad idea. But re-
| readig this:
|
| > Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models
| instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets,
| or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes
| cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
|
| this might just be an excellent tool for refactoring Excel sheets
| into something more robust and maintainable. And making a bunch
| of suits redundant.
| lionkor wrote:
| There's already a language for this, or multiple, that isn't
| English. Not having to use this language is NOT going to make
| anything better.
|
| It will, however, make people resort more quickly to "I guess
| it's just not possible if Claude can't figure it out".
| teddyh wrote:
| "Copilot in Excel is a global financial crisis waiting to
| happen."
|
| -- Zack Korman,
| <https://x.com/ZackKorman/status/1974828240679166396>
| ada1981 wrote:
| Can we get it in Sheets?
| alex43578 wrote:
| On a related note, has anyone found a good local LLM option for
| working with Excel files?
|
| Here's my use case: I have a set of responses from a survey and
| want to perform sentiment analysis on them, classify them, etc.
| Ideally, I'd like to feed them one at a time to a local LLM with
| a prompt like: "Classify this survey response as positive,
| negative, or off-topic...etc".
|
| If I dump the whole spreadsheet into ChatGPT, I found that
| because of the context window, it can get "lazy"; while with a
| local LLM, I could just literally prompt it one row at a time to
| accomplish my goal, even if it takes a little longer in terms of
| GPU and wall-clock time.
|
| However, I can't find _anything_ that works off the shelf like
| this. It seems like a prime use case for local models.
| santadays wrote:
| Don't know about excel, but for Google Sheets. You can ask
| chatgpt to write you a appsscript custom function e.g
| CALL_OPENAI. Then you can pass in variables into.
| =CALL_OPEN("Classify this survey response as positive,
| negative, or off-topic: "&A1)
| thisguy47 wrote:
| Sheets also has an `AI` formula now that you can use to
| invoke Gemini models directly.
| dosnem wrote:
| Anyone understand how this could work? My mental model for llm is
| predictive text but here how can it understand cell A1 which has
| a string is the "header" for all values under it? How does it
| learn to understand table data like that?
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > Anyone understand how this could work? My mental model for
| llm is predictive text but here how can it understand cell A1
| which has a string is the "header" for all values under it? How
| does it learn to understand table data like that?
|
| I imagine it uses the new Agent Skills features
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills
| flowingfocus wrote:
| Version control and meaningful diffs for .xlsx will be in high
| demand in a few months
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-27 23:00 UTC)