Anthropic has enhanced its Claude AI model with new capabilities for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, a strategic move to expand its corporate footprint and challenge Microsoft’s dominance. newly launched Copilot Cowork — Claude also gives partial authority.
The updated add-ons are available for Mac and Windows users on paid Claude plans starting today, March 11.
Anthropic is also expanding how businesses can deploy tools.
Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint can now be accessed either through a Claude account or through an existing LLM gateway that routes to Claude models in Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or Microsoft Foundry.
This gives enterprises more flexibility to use add-ons within the cloud and compatibility settings that may already exist.
Shared context between Office applications
Starting March 11, paid Claude users on Mac and Windows can access a new beta experience in which Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint share the full context of a user’s conversation with an AI model between the two programs — no need to copy and paste it manually.
This means that Claude can carry information, instructions and task history between an open table and an open presentation in a single continuous session.
For example, Claude can write formulas to extract data from an Excel workbook and immediately apply it to a stylized PowerPoint slide in the same session.
“In practice: a financial analyst can ask Claude to extract comparable company financial data from an open workbook, create a spreadsheet of trade comps in Excel, pitch a valuation summary, and draft an email to the MD—without changing labels or re-explaining the dataset at each step,” Anthropic said in a press release.
It is based on Anthropic Release of Claude plug-in for Excel In October 2025.
Repeatable workflows within applications
A central feature of this launch is Capabilities, which allows teams to build and maintain recurring workflows directly in Excel and PowerPoint sidebars.
Instead of reloading references or re-requesting instructions, users can save standardized processes (such as specific variance analyzes or approved slide templates) as one-click actions available to the entire organization.
This may include workflows for repetitive financial analysis, the development of preferred home-style presentations, or general review steps that must be rewritten as commands each time.
Anthropic said that each Capability, whether personal or organization-wide, will work within add-ons in the same way that MCP connectors work.
“Workflows that used to be in one person’s head are becoming one-click actions that are available to the entire organization,” he said.
Anthropic differentiates these Skills from Guidelines, which allow users to set persistent preferences on add-ins, such as a preferred number format in Excel or rules for writing a presentation in PowerPoint.
Anthropic also ships a preloaded starter set of Skills, including:
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Excel: Checking models for formula errors, filling DCF and LBO templates, and cleaning up mixed data ranges.
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PowerPoint: A review of investment bank materials for building competitive landscape decks and aligning the narrative.
Likewise, Microsoft’s New Copilot Cowork capability introduced on Monday enables enterprise users to deploy agents to perform tasks in Microsoft applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.
The software giant revealed that it teamed up with Anthropic to release its own standalone Claude Cowork app for Mac and Windows earlier this year, offering a way for Claude to autonomously access, edit, create and transfer files on a user’s computer at the user’s direction.
Previously, even with autonomous tools like the standalone Claude Cowork app, users often had to ask the AI to complete tasks in separate steps for each application. Claude now maintains a continuous session reading live data and writing formulas simultaneously in both applications.
The battle of the enterprise software agents
Since then Launching Claude Cowork Earlier this year, Anthropic made a case for being a chat and productivity platform for enterprises.
With Google’s close ties to Google Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google Docs, and its continued leadership in the Office suite, rivals like Microsoft can bring AI capabilities directly into users’ workflows.
Anthropic didn’t present the new Skills feature as equivalent to the more autonomous, agentic behavior that Microsoft is now emphasizing with its Copilot Cowork.
But the release shows that Anthropic is steadily moving beyond chatbot use cases and into more structured, repetitive work within the applications that many business people already rely on.
Through the Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and Claude model family, Anthropic has penetrated the systems of many organizations using its high performance in coding metrics and general knowledge to better navigate the computer and complete knowledge work at speed, scale, and quality.
OpenClaw, an open source AI agent developer world by storm, owes much of its existence to Claude Code.
The result is yet another sign that the battle with enterprise AI isn’t just about which model performs best on the benchmarks. It’s increasingly about the AI tools and systems enterprises rely on to do real work on their existing applications, files and workflows.
