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In the pursuit of ultimate office automation, Anthropic has taken a crucial step. The company announced major upgrades to its Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint add-ins for Claude. This update introduces two core features: "Shared Context" and "Reusable Skills," aiming to end the pain of frequently switching between software and manually moving data.
Inter-Application Collaboration: "Seamless Transition" from Data to Presentation
The most remarkable breakthrough in this update is that Claude can now coordinate tasks simultaneously in Excel and PowerPoint.
Shared Context: Now, Claude has a unified "memory" across both applications. This means it can remember the financial analysis logic you performed in Excel and directly generate corresponding charts and summaries in PowerPoint, without users needing to re-enter instructions or manually paste content.
Background Automation: Users only need to give instructions in one window, and Claude can run across programs in the background. For example, analysts can ask Claude to retrieve comparative data from Excel and directly fill it into the competitor analysis page of a PPT, while also drafting a report email simultaneously.
Skill Reuse: Building Team-Specific "Action Packages"
To further enhance productivity, the new version introduces the Skills feature, allowing users to save complex and frequently used workflows as quick-access shortcuts:
Custom Workflows: Users can save complex commands like "audit financial model formula errors" or "generate a cleaning report from a messy dataset" as skills.
Official Starter Pack: Anthropic also launched several preset skills covering common office scenarios such as data cleaning and building competitor pages in PPTs.
Enterprise-Level Security and Deployment
Considering the needs of professional environments, the new features are now available to paid users of Claude on Mac and Windows.
Flexible Integration: Enterprises can deploy these plugins through existing cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or Microsoft Foundry, ensuring data flow complies with the company's existing security and compliance standards.
Privacy Protection: All input and output data will be automatically deleted from Anthropic's backend within 30 days, and chat records across sessions are not persistently stored at the moment.
Although the intelligent level has significantly improved, the current Claude plugins still have some limitations: they can only read and operate files that users have manually opened, and cannot create, open, or close local files on their own.
As Claude deeply integrates into the Microsoft Office ecosystem, the role of the AI assistant is evolving from a mere "chat window" into a "super scheduler" capable of understanding complex business logic and executing tasks across platforms.