Turn a Two Hour Excel Slog Into a 10-Minute Task with Claude in Excel

Install Claude in Excel from the Microsoft marketplace.

Find 5–10 CSVs of data. You can use sales data, expense tracking, or anything else you report on each month.

💡 Pro tip: Make sure you choose the same timeframe for your data sources.

Open a new Excel workbook. Import each CSV as a new tab using File > Import > CSV. Make sure you select “comma” as the delimiter.

Click the Claude logo in the top right, then start with this prompt:

I imported [data type] data from [source 1] and [source 2] from my website. Can you rename all the tabs and reformat all the data in the sheet so that it’s more readable?

Asking Claude if it can do the task can produce better results because it encourages Claude to explore the data, consider its capabilities, and come up with a plan. You can also explicitly ask Claude to make a plan.

💡 Pro tip: You can tell Claude to color-code the tabs based on data source and create tables in each tab.

Prompting Claude to build the master dashboard is important. The best results came from first asking Claude to look at all the data and make a recommendation.

What do you recommend doing to tie all this data together into a quick master report sheet?

Claude can break the data sources into tables and write formulas to bring the data together.

Claude can also make charts from the data. Ask it to visualize each dashboard component.

Once you’ve created a report you like, ask Claude to turn it into a reusable template:

Adjust the Dashboard formulas to make this work as a template I can use each month by importing the data into each tab. Create a README tab explaining how to use the template.