How to Use Claude for Excel - Complete Beginner Guide

If you've ever opened a spreadsheet someone sent you and thought, "What on earth am I looking at? " This video is going to make your life a lot easier. There's a new way to work in Excel where you can just ask questions in plain English. Get your formulas explained, clean up messy data in seconds, and even build spreadsheets from scratch just by describing what you want. And today, I'm going to show you exactly how it works.

Hi, I'm Jamie and welcome to Teachers Tech. Quick heads up before we get started. This video is sponsored by Enthropic, the company that makes Claude. Full disclosure upfront as always, but I only take on sponsorships for the tools that I actually use myself. And this one has genuinely changed how I work with Microsoft Excel. So, here's the idea. Claude is an AI assistant, and now it works as a sidebar right inside Excel. You open your spreadsheet, open the sidebar, and you can just talk to it about what you're looking at. It reads your data, it explains your formulas, it makes changes for you, and shows you exactly what you changed. so you can double check everything. Whether you're running a small business, managing reports at work, or just trying to figure out a spreadsheet someone sent to you, this is going to change how you use Excel. We're going to cover five real scenarios today. Understanding a spreadsheet you didn't build, cleaning up messy data, pulling data out of a PDF and making it useful, fixing broken formulas, and building something from a completely blank spreadsheet. But first, let's get it installed.

Getting Claude into Excel takes about 2 minutes. Before we start, one thing to mention. Clot for Excel is available on the pro, max, team, and enterprise plans. It's not available on the free plan. The pro plan starts around $20 a month. I'll have the links in the description if you want to check out your options. Okay. Inside Excel, head up to the home tab and then on the ribbon, look to the right and you'll see get add-ins. That when you click on it will open up the Microsoft addin store. Search for Claude by Anthropic for Excel. It should be the first result. Now, click add and Excel is going to install it for you. Only takes a few seconds. Once it's installed, you'll see Claude icon up on your home ribbon. Click that in the sidebar. Opens up on the right side of your workbook. First time it opens up, it's going to ask you to sign in. Use the same email and password you use for the claw. ai. Your plan's going to be detected automatically. So

there's no license key or anything like that to mess with. And that's it. You're all set up. Now, let me show you the two most important things about the interface before we dive in. First, this is where you type your prompts. You can ask Claude anything about your spreadsheet right here. Second, this is your keyboard shortcut. On Windows, it's controll + alt plus c. On Mac, it's control plus option plus c. That opens the sidebar from anywhere in Excel, which is honestly the fastest way to work with it. One quick thing worth mentioning, you can actually pick between different cla models inside the sidebar. There's sonnet port 4. 6, which is faster, and opus 4. 7 and opus 4. 6, six, which are more powerful for complex task. For most of what we're doing today

the default works great. All right, let's put all this to work. Okay, this right here is the scenario that every office worker has lived through. Somebody sends you a spreadsheet, they ask you a question about it and you open it up and you just have no idea what any of it does. Multiple tabs, formulas everywhere, no notes, no explanation. So, I'm going to show you what this looks like with Claude. This is a simple quarterly budget workbook. Let's pretend somebody on my team just sent it to me. We have four tabs. You can see summary, we have budget, we have actuals, categories. I'm going to make sure Claude is open. We'll just stretch this out. And this is what I'm going to ask. Give me a summary of what the spreadsheet does and how the tabs connect to each other. Let's submit. So Claude reads the entire workbook, every cell, every formula, every tab, and it's going to be telling me exactly what this is. Now I get a quick summary of what's happening here. The summary tab is the hub. It doesn't feed any other data. Budget, actuals, and categories are all the source tab feeding into summary. None of these source tabs reference each other. Now, let's take a look at this cell right here. See this formula? This would take me a minute or so to decode it on my own. So, I'm just going to just click in it and ask what's this formula in the cell and what does it actually calculate in plain English. So, look at this. It walks me through explaining to me what this is in plain English. It looks up the category code summary A9 which is ops finds the code from the category tabs code list and returns the corresponding full name from the name column. So then it gives me this brief understanding of what this is. So you can see how this can really accelerate my Excel skills. Let's try to get it to teach us something even more. Index and match together is honestly one of the formulas that confuses people the most because it's really two functions working as a team. I'm going to say explain the index match combo like I'm a beginner. Use an everyday example. And look at this. It's telling me like a restaurant menu. you know you want ops and then you can scan down the left column then you look across the right column called operations. So it's going step by step explaining so I can be taking a look of what's happening and really starting to understand what these formulas and functions do.

This is the use case I think is going to resonate with you most. You don't have to be a spreadsheet expert anymore to understand the spreadsheets other people send you. You can just ask. Okay, this next one is the one that's going to make you pause the video and go and get this addin installed. So, this is messy customer data and looks like something exported from another system, maybe a CRM or a form tool. Uh, if you take a look, look at the dates here, we have how many different formats? Four, five different formats. If we look over here at the phone numbers here, all the different formats here as well. The addresses, how they're just like packed into one line like this. And it looks like we have some of the same names in the companies spelled different ways for the same company, whether it be caps or different things. This would take a bit of time for myself to go and to clean this up by hand. Let's see what Claude can do. We're going to start with the date column here, this column F. So, I'm going to open up Claude here. We'll give it a little bit more room in here. So, I'm just going to go ahead and ask it to standardize all dates in column F to this format. Let's see what it does. Okay, so it's done. And you might be thinking, well, what are these dates? Well, these dates actually what it did here are Excel's internal date serial number. So these are all correct. But this wasn't quite the format that we wanted. So I'm just going to go and say this to Claude. The dates are showing as numbers now. Apply this format date formatting. So the columns so they display properly. And look at this. Now I got what I wanted here. Now claw isn't magic. Sometimes you do have to refine, but it's a quick fix just to explain in plain English what you want. All right. Next, let's move over to the phone numbers here and try the same thing. So, clean up the phone numbers in column C to a consistent format. And this is the pattern that I want. Every phone number looks like the same format. Now, let's try this. Find duplicate rows based on the email addresses and highlight them so I can decide what to keep. Actually, this is perfect. I was just going to ask about the duplicate emails, but Claude noticed that the company name thing, too, which is honestly the bigger issue in this data. So, let's do both. Highlight the rows that share duplicate phone numbers, and then we'll tackle the inconsistent company names right after. So, I'm going to prompt this both. Highlight the duplicate names of phone numbers first. All right. So, now it's asking me that question. Do I want to apply this? No. I want to adjust some, but I'm going to just say yes, apply them. I also want to point out that they found there was eight groups of duplicate phone numbers covering 18 rows. And it just highlighted, didn't delete them. It highlighted each group in distinct colors so we could easily spot them which rows that share the same number. So now we have both tasks are done. Here's the summary. We have duplicate phone highlights, eight groups of shared phone numbers across 18 rows. We have our different colors, company names, 17 cell updates across eight company, consolidating variations into consistent canonical names in this column right here. Let's keep cleaning. This time I want to work on the address column and I'm going to say split the addresses in column E into separate column for street, city, province, and postal code. So gone from one messy address column to four clean columns. This would be 20 minutes of careful work in the old world. Took about 15 seconds. And now my data is actually usable. I'm not exaggerating. If you deal with exported data regularly, this alone is worth the subscription. What used to be an hour of soul crushing cleanup is now a conversation. Okay

this next one is the demo that I think is going to surprise people the most. And it's a problem every small business owner has dealt with. This right here is a quarterly statement from a vendor. 27 line items, two pages. If I want to actually use this data, analyze it, total up and see what categories I'm spending the most on, I have to either type it all into a spreadsheet by hand or copy paste it rowby row or past some PDF extraction tool that doesn't quite work quite right or I can just drop it into Claude. All right, I have a blank workbook open here and all I'm going to do is drag that PDF from my desktop and drop it right into the Claude sidebar. And that's it. Claude can now see this whole document now. And I'm going to ask it to pull out what I need. I just got this quarterly statement from one of my vendors. Pull out all the line items on uh out of this PDF into a new sheet. Make sure each column is the right type, dates or dates, amounts or numbers. Let's go ahead and submit. Look at this. As it's working, I can see that Claude created a new sheet here and called it something sensible. Now I can see it's pulled all 27 items out. Date column is actually dates. Amount columns actually formatted with dollars and amounts. Categories are clean. We have formulas. This is a process that would have taken me at least 20 minutes of careful typing done in maybe about 20 or 30 seconds. Let me make sure nothing got mangled. I'm just going to ask it this. Did everything import correctly? any rows that look wrong or amounts that didn't match totals on the original PDF. So, Claude actually checks. It compares the row totals to the subtotals and the tax shown on the PDF and confirms that the math works out. That's what kind of doublechecking I'd want anybody to do before trusting my extracted data. And look at that. No issues found. Now, here's where this gets really useful. Just having the data in a spreadsheet isn't the goal. The goal is understanding it. I'm going to say, "Build me a pivot table that shows total spending by category by month. Put it on a new sheet. " So, done. Pivot table on a new sheet. Categories down the side, months across the top, totals in the cells. And here's the part that I want to call out for anyone watching who has avoided pivot tables for their entire career. Pivot tables are the single most intimidating Excel feature I get asked about. I have viewers who have used Excel for years and still won't touch them. And we just made one by typing a sentence. No drag and drop, no field list, no value versus rows versus columns. Just describe what you want. All right, let me push it further. I'm going to say add a column showing what percentage of total spending each category represents and sort the pivot table from highest spender to lowest. And so now I can see at a glance that boxes is my biggest line item, then filler, and then everything else. useful information that took me one prompt to get it out. Let's keep going. Last thing, add a clustered column chart for from this pivot so I can see the spending visually. Months on the x-axis, a different color for each category. All right, let's check it out here. I think what I'll do is I'll just close this and move down a little bit. So, here is my chart that it created for me. All I did was that prompt. So, three months side by side, color-coded by category. I could hand this to my bookkeeper, send it to my business partner, or just look at it myself and figure out where I need to cut spending next quarter. Think about what just happened. We started with a PDF that arrived in an

inbox. We ended with a clean spreadsheet, a pivot table, and a chart ready to share. Five prompts, maybe four minutes in total. That whole workflow used to be an afternoon. But I want to show you one more thing before we move on because this is the feature that honestly made me say, "Wait, really? " The first time I tried it, I've already done all the analysis in Excel, right? So, normally if I wanted to turn this into a slide for a meeting, I'd screenshot the chart, paste it into PowerPoint, fix the sizing, add a title, maybe retype key numbers. 10 minutes of busy work. I'm in PowerPoint now, blank deck. I open the Claude sidebar just like I did in Excel. I can do that here, too. And because Claude shares context across Excel and PowerPoint, it already knows what I was doing. So, I'm going to say this. Create a onelide executive summary of the vendor spending analysis from the Excel file I was just working on. Show the top spending categories and call out the total spend for the quarter. And there it is. Let me close this down. Clean slide, title, key numbers, pulled straight from the Excel analysis, top categories called out. I didn't copy anything. I didn't paste anything. I didn't explain what I wanted analysis. Claude already knew because it was in the conversation. And that's the part that I think is genuinely new. It's not just Excel getting smarter. It's the whole Microsoft Office suite working together through one conversation. If you work in Word and PowerPoint alongside Excel, that shared context is probably going to save you more time than any single feature in Excel sidebar. Okay, let's get back to Excel. Now

let's talk about errors. If you've used Excel for more than a week, you've seen these hash ref, hash value, hash NA, uh circular references, and the worst part is Excel doesn't always tell you why. It just gives you the error and leaves you to figure it out. Let me ask Claude instead. There's a ref error in the total column. Can you explain what went wrong? and fix it. Now, look at this. Claw doesn't just fix it. It's going to explain what went wrong. So, I can see it found the problem. Now, it's explaining to me what it should be and how they fixed it here, what it changed from. And notice this already. As a side note, I spotted a few other issues in this sheet if you'd like me to take a look at them. And yes, these are the ones I was going to ask it about as well. Let's fix the value one. Fix the value error in the summary note below the budget table. I think it already knew that, but tell me what caused it before you make the change. So, this one's a classic. Somebody tried to add text to a number using the plus sign instead of concatenation. Claude explained it, fixes it, moves on. There's a circular reference warning somewhere in this file. Find it and explain what's happening. So, two cells pointing at each other. Claude traces it and shows me exactly where the loop is. Then ask how I want to resolve it. And just like that, that's fixed. Let's do one more. There's also an aa error on the owner lookup. And while you're at it, audit the rest of the workbook for any other issues. Don't fix anything yet. Just tell me what you find. And this is the teaching part that I love. Claude, not just doing the work, it's walking me through it. So, which means the next time I see a hash value error on my own, I'll actually recognize what caused it. That's the thing. You're not just getting your spreadsheet

fixed, you're learning Excel along the way. All right, last demo. We're starting from a completely blank spreadsheet. A lot of small business owners I talked to tell me that they know Excel could help them, but they don't even know where to start. Building a tracker from zero feels overwhelming. So, let's build something actually useful together. Build me a monthly expense tracker for a small business. I need columns for date, category description, amount, and a running total. Set up categories for rent, utilities, supplies, marketing, and other. Add a summary section at the top with total by categories. Let's go and submit this. Now, look at this. In under a minute, I have a working expense tracker, column headers, proper formatting, summary section with category totals already allocated. The formulas are all in place, but here's the important part. This is a conversation, not a oneshot magic trick. Let me keep pushing. Add a column that shows month overmonth change as percentage and add a row that tracks total spending per month. All right, it's done. And notice it didn't break anything that was already there. Let's keep going. Now, let's add budgets. Give me separate section where I can set a budget for each category. Then add conditional formatting so that it actually go spending goes over the budget, the cell turns red. And look at this. We have our budget section here with the formatting on. We have green, amber, and red showing the warnings where we'll be at. So if it's over budget in any category, it's going to get flagged automatically. Let me test it. I'll drop a big number into marketing real quick and see what happens. $50,000 should do this. Oh, there we have red all over the place. Last thing, let's add a bar chart to show spending by category and put it next to the summary at the top. All right. Now, here's the chart that it created the spending versus budget. I had to go through I did delete the $50,000 marketing that I did before just so it wouldn't be skewed. I want to point out something about how this worked. I didn't plan this out perfectly up front. I started simple, then I added to it, then I added more. And that's how real work happens. Zinc and Claude adapted every time without breaking what was there already. So that's what I call a thinking partner, not a magic wand. You're still driving. It's just making you way faster at the parts that used to slow you down. So that's Claude for Excel. We walk through installing it, understanding

a spreadsheet you didn't build, cleaning messy data, pulling data out of a PDF, fixing errors, and building from scratch. A couple honest thoughts before I wrap up. So what impressed me the most was the explanations. It's not just giving you answers. is teaching you what they mean and every change gets highlighted so you always know what changed. What to keep in mind? Claude can make mistakes. So review its work before you save anything important. And for right now, your chat history doesn't carry between Excel sessions. So when you close the file, that conversation is gone. Link is in the description if you want to try it yourself. Let me know in the comments what you know you're going to use this for first. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.