Claude’s new spreadsheets, whiteboards, and data tools won’t replace Excel tomorrow. But Anthropic is coming for something bigger. To become the place where you start your working day.
Anthropic isn’t content to have Claude help you use office software. Oh no. It wants Claude to become your office.
On November 10, Anthropic launched Claude Sheets and Claude Whiteboards in beta and made its dashboard product, Claude Data, generally available. All three come with paid Claude plans. The targets are obvious: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. The awkward part? Microsoft and Google are also Anthropic backers. Welcome to the AI business, where your investment can become your competition.
Microsoft investors got the message. CNBC reported a sudden, sharp 3% drop in Microsoft’s share price immediately after the announcement. The stock finished Tuesday down 2.20%, at $533.16. Since then, frightened Microsoft stock owners have seen the price drop an additional 2.5%. Live by AI, die by AI? We’ll see.
Does that mean Excel is toast?
Please. Even Anthropic isn’t claiming that.
Still, this move has both Microsoft and other proprietary software companies worrying about how AI may directly affect their business models. You see, Anthropic is just following a growing trend of AI developers producing AI-generated copies of programs. After all, why pay a subscription fee to Adobe or Microsoft when you can use a free AI copy of Adobe Premiere or Microsoft PowerPoint?
The same approach is also putting an end to the eternal anti-Linux desktop argument, “I can’t use Linux! It won’t run Photoshop or fill-in-the-blank vital, but obscure programs.” Except, of course, now you can—E.g., PhotoCraft for Photoshop.
Another growing trend that’s more directly comparable to what Anthropic is up to, is companies cloning SaaS programs. For example, OccupySaaS is working on Auth0 as ZeroAuthy and Salesforce as SalesCompel, and SolidCraft is hammering away at cloning Autodesk Fusion, a popular 3D CAD software suite.
Less Copying and Pasting. More Staying in Claude.
Claude’s ambitions are even bigger. After all, if you use AI for work, you know the shuffle. Ask the chatbot for help. Copy the result into another application. Fix it. Go back to the chatbot. Explain what changed.
Repeat until frustrated, or, you hope, you’ve finished your project.
Anthropic wants to eliminate that back-and-forth.
“Working with Claude on a project often meant moving the output over to another tool or program, where Claude didn’t have live access to follow progress and changes,” the company explained. Its answer is to keep more of that work inside Claude, where people and the assistant can continue editing it together.
Here’s what that looks like. First, Claude Sheets builds editable spreadsheets with tabs, formulas, formatting, and dropdowns. Ask for a hiring budget or campaign tracker, then change the cells yourself or tell Claude what to fix. It outlines its edits and supports exports to Excel .xlsx format and CSV.
Meanwhile, Claude Whiteboards turns brainstorming into an organized shared whiteboard rather than a collection of digital sticky notes. Claude can group ideas into themes, build timelines, and help turn the results into documents or slide decks. Boards can also move into tools such as Miro and Lucid.
Finally, Claude Data connects to data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and ClickHouse to build dashboards. There, it can refresh schedules and track changes. Certified queries and live sharing are still to come. That last feature may sound dull. It’s not. For AI to be truly useful, it needs access to your data in real time without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears pulling the data into your models. Once there, you can use it to build smart dashboards that make it easy to understand what you have in your data.
But wait! There’s more! Bloomberg also reported a video-call assistant as part of Anthropic’s broader workplace push. But don’t lump everything into one finished “Claude Office” package: Sheets and Whiteboards are beta products, Data is generally available, and the meeting assistant isn’t out yet.
So, look, Excel isn’t going anywhere. Not yet anyway.
Anthropic itself calls Claude Sheets’ capabilities “simple spreadsheet functionality.” If you need the full Excel experience, the company points you toward exports or Claude for Excel.
Nicholas Lin, an Anthropic product leader, told Bloomberg that Sheets is “fairly basic” and that existing spreadsheet plug-ins are better suited to advanced work such as financial modeling. “I think there’s a time and place for these Microsoft and Google products, especially for more advanced enterprise use cases,” Lin said. “But we’re hoping to show new ways of working inside Claude as well.”
In other words, don’t move the company’s financial model just because Claude can knock together a budget. We’re not there yet.
That said, don’t dismiss the Claude budget, either. For plenty of everyday work, a straightforward tracker is all anyone needs. If Claude can build it while you’re already discussing the project, opening another application becomes an extra step.
And that’s where this gets interesting for users and Anthropic and troubling for Microsoft.
You see, Microsoft doesn’t need to lose every Excel user to have a problem. Nor does Google need to see every shared spreadsheet migrate to Claude.
The more consequential question is: Which application do you open first?
Anthropic wants the answer to be Claude. Not just when you have a question, but when you need to plan a project, organize its data, build its documents, and bring in other applications. Microsoft still wants to use its familiar desktop interface, while Google wants to stay in its Chrome-based SaaS universe.
Will they replace the old models? No. After all, a VisiCalc user from 1978 would still recognize any modern spreadsheet.
But if Anthropic gets its way, you’ll start in Claude, and then either work within it when their apps are good enough or pull in somebody else’s software when they aren’t.
So “Anthropic launches an Office rival” is only half the story. It is also trying to become the interface through which you use everybody else’s business software. Just as Microsoft made the Windows desktop, the work interface from the 80s until recently, and Google made the Chrome web browser, the work interface for SaaS-oriented offices, Anthropic wants its Claude interface to be the workplace of the 2020s and beyond.
True, today Claude Sheets is no Excel. That said, Anthropic is trying to close the gap between asking an AI to do something and actually doing the work. Native tools handle the basics. Connectors bring in the rest. The conversation becomes the workspace.
Excel doesn’t have to disappear for that to matter.
It only has to stop being the first thing you open at work on Monday morning.
