Anthropic has upgraded its Claude AI model with new capabilities for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, marking a strategic move to expand its enterprise footprint and potentially challenging Microsoft’s newly launched Copilot Cowork — which Claude also partially powers. The updated add-ins are available to Mac and Windows users on paid Claude plans starting today, March 11. Anthropic is also expanding how enterprises can deploy the tools. Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint can now be accessed either through a Claude account or through an existing LLM gateway routing to Claude models on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry. That gives enterprises more flexibility to use the add-ins within cloud and compliance setups they may already have in place.Shared context across Office appsStarting 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 the AI model between the two applications — no need for manually copying and pasting it over.That means Claude can carry information, instructions and task history between an open spreadsheet 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 pull comparable company financials from an open workbook, build out a trading comps table in Excel, drop the valuation summary into the pitch deck, and draft the email to the MD—without switching tabs or re-explaining the dataset at each step,” Anthropic said in a press release. This builds on Anthropic’s release of …
