Are they? Still seems way more convenient to just connect Claude to whatever people are already running.

Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.

This isn’t true. Today we needed to build a model for our startup to forecast headcount. Usually I’d use excel. Instead Claude built an app for me. More powerful features in a fraction of the time.

You're a single person in a startup.

For good or bad, big companies run on Excel.

At my last job - a large tech company - if it wasn't in Excel, then engineers and HR wouldn't use it. The team had a tool that collected data from various databases for the end user and did some analytics. The code was in Python. The output was an Excel file.

I asked why they didn't use pandas.

"Because the users are just going to take the output and put it in Excel."

It was a very successful tool. No one needed to use it so we had to ensure users liked it. All due to the team lead's wisdom on how big companies operate.

They also wanted us to autogenerated PowerPoint files. We gave up on that. The spec is a mess.

They run on excel today. They will run on code in the future. Excel was a way for normies to write code with all the limitations that came with it. Now normies can just write the code.

I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.

You built an "app" though - you could have done that with the model du jour, right?

You now have that app forever and nothing connects it to Claude other than the comment saying "this isn't just rounding — it's the single source of truth for the shared ledger boundary, not a formatting concern."

While I agree that spreadsheets are likely to be used less by regular folk, the idea that we'll become reliant on claude feels unlikely.

[delayed]

Nadella already said that they expect to have more revenue from agents than from humans.

They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.

Ironically, Claude is building stuff for humans :)

You mean like slack did?

Yep, just need Claude Mail (Cmail, anyone?) and Cluade Docs and you have a strong competitor to Google Workspaces. I'd consider using Cmail to start getting out of googles ad ecosystem.

and… into anthropic’s instead??

I did my first claude slides presentation. I don't see myself voluntarily loading up PowerPoint again.

Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.

Honestly, Excel seems easier to me, with the caveat that Excel serves two purposes.

The "I need some place to organize tabular data" use case is so different that I'm not considering it for the rest of this.

But for actual computation, if you throw it in Claude, it'll figure it out. It's much easier to do than to use Excel. Claude itself isn't limited to Excel; it can use pandas and the much, much improved plotting tools compared to Excel. I'm an OpenAI guy myself and used codecs to have it make me ggplot2 graphs, but then I forgot to specify it and it just used straight-up Python — I think it actually generated them as SVG files. As sad as I was about it, they looked better than the ones I had it make using ggplot2.

Regular Excel doesn't even compare there; not only can ggplot2 make many additional types of graphs, but SVG plotting, Python, and pandas can make literally any chart you want, including things like polar-coordinate charts.