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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Probably because many people here are software developers, and wrapping spreadsheets in deterministic logic and a consistent UI covers... most software use cases.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Whats with claiming negativity when most of the comments here are positive?

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

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

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 :)

> 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.

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

What happened? I'm a Max subscriber and I'd like to know what to look out for!

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

Presenting your finances to investors via a tool designed for generation of plausible looking data is fraud.

> 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

> 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.

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.

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.

That's exactly what they're doing.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/advancing-claude-for-financia...

So more or less like what AI has been doing for the last couple of years when it comes to writing code?

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.

its a great time for your ai excel add-in to start getting acquired by a claude competitor though

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can add and customize skills in claude.ai and other surfaces

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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"

Gemini integratoins to Google workspace feels like it's using Gemini 1.5 flash, it's so comically bad at understanding and generating

Why second thoughts?

100%

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Claude is a model wrapper, no?

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

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.

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.

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.

I think this is aiming to be Claude Code for people who use Excel as a programming environment.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

https://www.metabase.com/features/metabot-ai

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.

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.

The fine tuning will continue until we reach AGI.

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.

You wouldn't believe the amount of shit that runs on Excel.

A program that can do excel for you is almost AGI

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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?

OK then. Groks?

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.