Claude Sheets takes on Excel, yet Anthropic sends heavy users back to Excel

Anthropic has added a spreadsheet and a shared whiteboard to Claude, two of the tools office workers open most often after email. Claude Sheets builds a working spreadsheet from a request as short as “make me a hiring budget”, with tabs, formulas, formatting and drop-down menus, and then keeps editing it in the cells alongside your colleagues. Claude Whiteboards turns a messy plan you talk through out loud into a board with a timeline, owners and deadlines that the whole team can edit at once.

The point is to stop the copy-and-paste routine. Until now, anything you brainstormed or built with Claude had to be moved into Google Sheets, Excel or Miro before anyone else could work on it. With these tools the board or the spreadsheet stays where Claude made it, Claude keeps access to it, and your team edits the same file, which is the same pitch Microsoft makes for Copilot inside Office and Google makes for Gemini in Workspace, approached from the opposite end.

Both arrive in beta on every paid Claude plan, on the web, the desktop apps and mobile. In Sheets, Claude outlines each edit it makes so you can see which cells it touched. In Whiteboards, a retrospective meeting can dump everyone’s notes on the board and ask Claude to group them by theme and draft action items for each person, or you can drag a box around one corner of the board and ask questions about just that part. When the brainstorm is over, Claude converts the board into a document or a slide deck.

A third piece, Claude Data, is the renamed Claude Dashboards and is now generally available. It connects to the systems where companies keep their numbers, such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Amazon Redshift or Salesforce, and answers questions with dashboards, written data stories or short narrated videos. Data teams can mark certain queries as certified so everyone works from the same definition of a metric, and shared dashboards show live numbers to colleagues who do not have access to the underlying database.

Anthropic is also turning Claude into a place where other companies’ software lives. Interactive connectors now open full versions of apps such as Adobe, Atlassian, Box and Notion beside the conversation, so you can work in them yourself or ask Claude to make changes, and plugins for Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday arrive with ready-made skills for sales calls, accounting and HR requests. Its marketplace lists more than 9,000 connectors and plugins.

The limits are written into Anthropic’s own announcement. It says Sheets has “simple spreadsheet functionality” for now, and that when you need everything Excel does you should export to an .xlsx or CSV file or use its Claude for Excel add-in. That is an honest admission that the Excel challenger still depends on Excel. Enterprise administrators also have to switch Sheets and Whiteboards on, because they arrive turned off on those plans. And Claude Meetings, the feature that drew the most attention, is not out yet.

Anthropic describes Meetings only as coming soon: you will be able to add Claude to a call so it takes notes and updates the documents your team is working on while people talk. TechCrunch reported further details, including that Claude would join Google Meet first, announce itself in the meeting chat and leave automatically if an outside guest joins, but Anthropic’s announcement gives no date.

The launch lands a few weeks after OpenAI added its own workplace tools to ChatGPT, and both companies are now building something that looks more and more like an office suite. Sheets and Whiteboards join the documents, slide decks and designs Claude could already produce, plus its Motion animation tool, still in beta. Claude itself is not offered everywhere: Anthropic’s list of supported countries excludes China, Hong Kong and Russia, so the new tools are unavailable there too.

Claude Sheets and Claude Whiteboards went live in beta on November 10, 2026. On Team plans all three tools are switched on by default, and on Enterprise plans Claude Data turns on by default on November 19, 2026, unless an administrator changes it in the organization’s artifact settings. Anthropic has given no release date for Claude Meetings.

For now, the most telling feature of Anthropic’s spreadsheet is its export button.

Tags: Anthropic, Claude, Claude Data, Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, Microsoft Excel