Claude for Excel and PowerPoint received a significant update on March 11, 2026, as Anthropic added shared context capabilities and a new Skills feature to its Microsoft Office add-ins for paid plan users on Mac and Windows.
Shared Context Across Office Applications
The updated add-ins now allow Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint to share the full conversation context between the two applications in a single continuous session. Users no longer need to manually copy and paste information between an open spreadsheet and an open presentation. Claude can carry instructions, data, and task history across both apps simultaneously.
As a practical example, Anthropic described a financial analyst workflow in which Claude pulls comparable company financials from an open workbook, builds a trading comparables table in Excel, drops the valuation summary into a pitch deck, and drafts an email — all without switching tabs or re-explaining the dataset at each step.
“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, Press Release
Skills Feature Enables Repeatable Workflows
A central addition to this release is Skills, which allows teams to build and save repeatable workflows directly inside the Excel and PowerPoint sidebars. Users can save standardized processes — such as specific variance analyses or approved slide templates — as one-click actions available to the entire organization. Anthropic said every Skill operates inside the add-ins the same way MCP connectors do.
Anthropic also ships a preloaded starter set of Skills with the update. For Excel, these include auditing models for formula errors, populating DCF and LBO templates, and cleaning messy data ranges. For PowerPoint, the starter Skills cover building competitive landscape decks and reviewing investment banking materials for narrative alignment.
“Workflows that previously lived in one person’s head become one-click actions available to the whole organization.”
Anthropic, Press Release
Enterprise Deployment and Cloud Gateway Access
Anthropic expanded enterprise deployment options alongside the feature update. The add-ins 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. This gives enterprises more flexibility to use the add-ins within cloud and compliance setups they may already have in place.
Anthropic distinguishes Skills from Instructions, a separate feature that lets users set persistent preferences across the add-ins — such as preferred number formatting in Excel or presentation-writing rules in PowerPoint. The shared context capability builds on Anthropic’s release of a Claude plugin for Excel in October 2025.
Claude for Excel Enters a Competitive Enterprise AI Market
The update positions Anthropic more directly against Microsoft and Google in the enterprise productivity space. Microsoft introduced its Copilot Cowork capability on March 9, 2026, enabling enterprise users to deploy agents across Microsoft applications including Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft stated that Copilot Cowork was built in conjunction with Anthropic.
Google, meanwhile, maintains a close association with Google Workspace — which includes Gmail and Google Docs — giving it a direct channel to bring artificial intelligence capabilities into user workflows. Anthropic, through Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and the Claude model family, has expanded its presence across many organizations’ systems, using performance in coding benchmarks and general knowledge tasks to complete knowledge work at scale.
The competition in enterprise software is increasingly focused not on benchmark performance alone, but on which AI tools enterprises trust to complete real work across their existing applications, files, and workflows. Anthropic’s latest update reflects that shift, moving Claude further into structured, repeatable work inside applications that business users already rely on daily.