Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.
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.
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 autogenerate PowerPoint files. We gave up on that. The spec is a mess.
I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
Normies know enough Excel to debug their "code". Will they be able to debug code AI produces?
> I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
How much of that Excel usage is part of the regular flow? As in several different teams using and sharing Excel files with a common template, so they can have macros that depend on the shape of data in the spreadsheet?
If the traders are mostly just using it for their own individual analyses, I can believe you. If they're sharing the Excel files across disparate departments ... it will be tougher.
A much simpler solution that a full blown replacement is simply having AI read, understand and edit Excel files. Why go with a completely different solution if the AI can solve all your problems within Excel?
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.
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.
They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.
Omarchy? yep.