Claude is now available as an add-in inside Excel. But instead of using Claude to build a fancy-looking dashboard, I wanted to test something more practical. Can Claude actually help with real analysis in Excel? In this blog, I ask Claude to work on a sales dataset and answer a few business questions. We test basic things like calculating total sales, writing XLOOKUP formulas, creating pivot tables, showing numbers in thousands, finding year-on-year growth, and checking days where a product crossed a sales threshold. More importantly, I also show how to audit Claude’s work and check whether the output is actually correct. Because in real analysis, you cannot blindly trust AI. You still need to understand formulas, pivot tables, data structure, and the numbers behind the answer.
