Claude for Excel

Claude for Excel is Anthropic's Excel add-in, one of four Office agents alongside Claude for PowerPoint, Word and Outlook. Anthropic's own documentation now calls the family "Office agents" and states that Claude for Excel is generally available to Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. It runs in a sidebar inside Excel rather than as a separate application. What it does, in the vendor's own framing. Answer questions about an open workbook with cell-level citations that jump to the referenced cell. Adjust assumptions while keeping formula relationships intact. Identify and resolve errors and their root causes. Generate new models or populate existing templates, and work across multi-tab workbooks. Connectors and Skills are the extension layer and they are built on the Model Context Protocol. Claude for Excel can pull external context through connectors, and Anthropic names S&P Global, LSEG and Daloopa specifically. Skills apply reusable task recipes automatically as you work. Connectors and Skills behave the same way across all four Office agents and are enabled once in Claude settings rather than per application. There is an important trade-off here that is easy to miss. Anthropic states that connectors and Skills are available when you sign in with a Claude account directly. When you connect through a third-party platform such as Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry or an LLM gateway, these capabilities may not be available. So the enterprise routing flexibility and the connector layer pull in opposite directions, and a regulated buyer should decide which one matters more before deploying. Pricing is bundled into the Claude subscription with no separate Claude for Excel fee. Pro is $17 per month on an annual subscription or $20 billed monthly, Max 5x is $100 per month, Max 20x is $200 per month, Team is $20 per seat per month, and Enterprise is quoted rather than published. The limitations are the vendor's own and they are specific. Anthropic does not recommend Claude for Excel for final client deliverables without human review, for audit-critical calculations without verification, or for models holding highly sensitive or regulated data without proper controls. Data tables and macro or VBA operations are unsupported outright. The add-in does not run on Excel 2016 or 2019 perpetual or volume licenses, or on Excel for iPad. Anthropic also warns explicitly about prompt injection from untrusted workbooks, where instructions can hide in cells, formulas or comments. Security is confirmed on trust.anthropic.com and on claude.com/solutions/enterprise, which states "SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA compliance" in its own enterprise feature list. One gap is published by Anthropic and was re-verified word for word for this audit. Claude for Excel does not inherit custom data retention settings an organization may have set, and its activity is not included in Enterprise audit logs or the Compliance API. Enterprise administrators can connect an OpenTelemetry audit feed, usage analytics and spend tracking to their own tooling, which mitigates the gap without closing it. Anthropic states that on Pro, Max and Team plans observability and audit export are not available at all. Claude for Excel is not the right fit for an organization standardizing on Microsoft 365 Copilot as its single AI vendor, since that is embedded in Microsoft 365 without a second subscription. Anyone whose work spans the whole desktop rather than one workbook should look at Claude Cowork instead. Current state Q3 2026: Claude Fable 5 access was restored on July 1, 2026 after export controls were lifted on June 30, and Sonnet 5 launched on June 30. Both are available through Claude for Excel. Anthropic's documentation moved from the help center to claude.com/docs/office-agents during 2026.