Anthropic Releases Microsoft Excel Support in Claude, Adds New Agentic Skills for Financial Tasks

Anthropic released several new connectors and financial service-focused agentic skills for Claude on Monday. The biggest highlight among them is support for Microsoft Excel, allowing a Claude sidebar to analyse and perform tasks within the spreadsheet workbooks. The new integration comes just a month after the Windows maker added Claude AI models to Copilot. This is currently available as a research preview, but is expected to get a wider release soon. Apart from this, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm is also expanding its financial services with six new agentic skills.

Anthropic Releases New Connectors and Agentic Skills for Claude

In a newsroom post, Anthropic detailed the new features coming to Claude. With the Excel integration, the company says users will see a new Claude sidebar while working on spreadsheets. The AI chatbot can read, analyse, modify, and create new workbooks. To ensure safety, the chatbot also provides full transparency about the actions it takes by explaining its changes and letting users navigate to the referenced cells.

The new capability builds on Claude's existing integration with Microsoft 365 that already lets the chatbot search for files, emails, and Teams conversations. Notably, Claude for Excel is available in beta for Max, Enterprise, and Teams users.

Apart from this, the company has announced six new connectors to let Claude access third-party data hubs. All of these connectors are built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardises how AI systems access third-party data. The six platforms to which Claude can connect are Aiera (real-time earnings call transcripts), Chronograph (operational and financial information), Egnyte (secure search access), LSEG (live market data), Moody (credit ratings, research, and company data), and MT Newswires (latest news on financial markets and economies).

Anthropic is also building on Agent Skills, which was introduced earlier this month. These are sandboxed environments or folders with instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can operate within. Now, the company is introducing the following six new skills:

• Comparable company analysis - This lets Claude analyse a company's performance with valuation multiples and operating metrics
• Discounted cash flow models - It offers full free cash flow projections, weighted average cost of capital (WACC) calculations, scenario toggles, and sensitivity tables.
• Due diligence data packs - This skill can process data room documents into Excel spreadsheets.
• Company teasers and profiles - As per Anthropic, it offers condensed company overviews for pitch books and buyer lists.
• Earnings analyses - It can research quarterly transcripts and financials to extract insights.
• Initiating coverage reports - It is capable of creating industry analysis, company deep-dives, and valuation frameworks.

Just like Claude for Excel, these new skills are also being rolled out in preview for Max, Enterprise, and Teams users.