Anthropic gives Claude shared context across Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, enabling reusable workflows in multiple applications

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 apps

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 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 a Claude plugin for Excel back in October 2025.

Repeatable workflows inside applications 

A central feature of this launch is Skills, which allows teams to build and save repeatable workflows directly inside the Excel and PowerPoint sidebars.

Rather than re-uploading references or re-prompting instructions, users can save standardized processes—such as specific variance analyses or approved slide templates—as one-click actions available to the entire organization.

That could include workflows for recurring financial analysis, preparing presentations in a preferred house style or running common review steps that would otherwise need to be rewritten as prompts each time.

Anthropic said every Skill, whether personal or organization-wide, will work inside the add-ins the same way MCP connectors do.

“Workflows that previously lived in one person’s head become one-click actions available to the whole organization,” the company said. 

Anthropic distinguishes these Skills from Instructions, which let users set persistent preferences across the add-ins, such as preferred number formatting in Excel or presentation-writing rules in PowerPoint.

Anthropic is also shipping a preloaded starter set of Skills, including:

• Excel: Auditing models for formula errors, populating DCF and LBO templates, and cleaning messy data ranges.

• PowerPoint: Building competitive landscape decks and reviewing investment banking materials for narrative alignment.

Similarly, Microsoft’s new Copilot Cowork capability introduced on Monday enables enterprise users to deploy agents to complete tasks across Microsoft applications such as Excel and PowerPoint. 

The software giant openly stated it was built in conjunction with Anthropic, which also released its own stand-alone Claude Cowork application for Mac and Windows earlier this year offering a way for Claude to access, edit, create and move information between files on a user's computer, autonomously, 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. Now, Claude maintains a continuous session that reads live data and writes formulas across both apps simultaneously.

Battle of the enterprise app agents

Ever since the launch of Claude Cowork earlier this year, Anthropic has been making a case to be the chat and productivity platform of choice for enterprises.

Competitors like Google, with its close association with Google Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google Docs, and Microsoft, with its continued leadership in the Office suite, can directly bring AI capabilities to users’ workflows. 

Anthropic did not present the new Skills feature as equivalent to the more autonomous, agentic behavior Microsoft is now emphasizing with its own Copilot Cowork.

But the release does show Anthropic steadily expanding beyond chatbot use cases and into more structured, repeatable work inside the applications many business users already rely on.

Anthropic, through Claude Cowork, Claude Code and the Claude model family, has seeped into many organizations’ systems, using its high performance in coding benchmarks and general knowledge to navigate a computer better and complete knowledge work rapidly, at scale, with high quality.

OpenClaw, the open source AI agent that has taken the developer world by storm, owes much of its existence to Claude Code. 

The result is another sign that the battle over enterprise AI is no longer just about which model performs best on benchmarks. It is increasingly about what AI tools and systems enterprises trust to get real work done across their existing applications, files, and workflows.