Claude AI for Excel

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. AI tools are used in the production of this course, including AI-assisted speech delivery based on the instructor's own voice. All content, demonstrations, workbooks, and prompts have been personally designed, reviewed, and verified by the instructor to ensure accuracy and practical value.

Claude now works directly inside Excel. This course shows you how to direct it with confidence: what it can see, how to instruct it precisely, and how to turn its output into workbooks you can trust, from everyday formulas and formatting through pivot tables, data cleaning, Power Query, VBA and statistical analysis.

Every lesson is hands-on. You will work through realistic business workbooks, supplied with the course, asking Claude to do the work while you learn to check, refine and understand what it produces. No programming background is needed: where Claude writes M code or VBA, you will learn to read it, run it and adapt it.

Where an operation is quick to do in Excel itself, such as basic sorting, simple formatting or managing sheets, the course switches to Try It Yourself practice lessons. Each one gives you the workbook and ready-made prompts to work through on your own, so the video lessons can focus on the tasks where Claude adds the most value.

What you will cover:

• Foundations: installing the Claude add-in, what Claude can and cannot see in your workbook, its hard limits and the workarounds, the three layers of AI assistance, and a prompting method built on goal, scope, format and constraints.
• Cell data and formulas: reading and writing cell data, writing formulas, self-documenting workbooks with cell notes, and the core formula patterns: SUMIFS, XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, IF, IFS, SWITCH and nested logic.
• Formatting: number formats for currency, percentages and dates, custom format codes and scaling, cell styles, and conditional formatting with colour scales, data bars, icon sets and formula-based rules.
• Sheet structure: creating, duplicating and reorganising sheets, building workbooks from scratch, and grouping and freeze panes for large sheets.
• Charts: choosing the right chart type, multi-series charts, titles, data labels and trendlines.
• Pivot tables: preparing good source data, framing the business question, field layout, aggregation, Show Values As, and sorting and filtering within a pivot.
• Data tools: sorting and filtering, dropdown lists and validation rules, and cleaning and de-duplicating messy real-world data.
• Power Query and VBA: when to use each, reading the M code Claude writes, a recommended workflow, and asking Claude to create VBA macros, including cross-application automation.
• External data: searching the web with cited sources, structuring and verifying web data, and extracting data from CSV, XLSX, PDF and DOCX files.
• Analysis: descriptive statistics, correlation and distribution, statistical summary tables, two-variable sensitivity grids built without data tables, and tornado charts.

Who this course is for:

• Excel users who want Claude to take on the heavy lifting while staying in control of the results.
• Analysts, accountants and finance professionals who build and maintain business workbooks.
• Managers and team leads who report from spreadsheets and want faster, more reliable output.
• Power users curious about Power Query and VBA who want AI to write the code and help them understand it.
• Anyone evaluating Claude for Excel for their team who needs a practical, structured introduction.