Claude in Excel is really good. Its weird that using Microsoft's own Excel agent using Claude 4.5 often yields weaker answers, It seems to be because the Excel agent relies on Excel alone (VLOOKUPs, etc) while Claude in Excel does its own analysis and uses Excel for output.

The difference between the software being the point (Microsoft's perspective) and the output being the point (Anthropic's perspective). Do you care about the tool, or about the answer? Seems like that is going be a very consequential decision for who wins the agentic work space.

Claude for Excel also builds formulas and constructs well formatted sheets properly as well, in case you haven't seen those capabilities.