Anthropic Expands Availability of Cowork and Claude in Excel: Revolutionize Your Spreadsheets!

By 2026, the competition in the AI sector is expected to be fierce. While Google appears to be a strong contender to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic is solidifying its position among professional users. At the end of January, the company decided to broaden the availability of its Claude in Excel and Cowork features. Let’s delve into the details!

Claude in Excel Now Available in the Pro Plan

Anthropic is making Claude in Excel accessible to subscribers of the Pro plan. Priced at $20 per month, this plan caters to professionals and freelancers who rely on Claude daily for advanced productivity tasks. Initially unveiled in October 2025, this feature was previously only available to Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.

As a reminder, Claude in Excel enables the assistant to analyze an entire Excel workbook, including nested formulas and dependencies across tabs. The tool integrates directly within Excel and aims to simplify the understanding, modification, and validation of complex models without disrupting their structure.

“Claude in Excel can read, analyze, modify, and create new Excel workbooks. It provides complete transparency about its actions: it records and explains its modifications, allowing users to directly access the cells mentioned in its explanations,” Anthropic promised in October 2025.

Specifically, Claude in Excel allows users to:

• Test scenarios by altering assumptions while preserving existing formulas.
• Receive detailed explanations about cells, formulas, or entire sheets, with precise references.
• Quickly detect and correct errors, such as circular references or invalid values.
• Create or enhance financial models and templates using existing data.

To use Claude in Excel, you must first download the desktop app for Mac or Windows.

Cowork Now Available in the Team Plan

In January, Anthropic took another significant step in the field of agentive AI with the launch of Cowork. Described as a derivative of Claude Code, this assistant can perform tasks directly on the user’s computer. Once activated, Cowork can access authorized folders and tools, establish an action plan, and execute operations progressively, keeping the user informed. The goal is to delegate complete workflows to Claude, without needing to manually provide context at each step.

Cowork might, for example, reorganize files, create documents from notes or screenshots, conduct research, analyze data, or handle multiple complex tasks simultaneously. The tool operates through the Claude Desktop application, currently available only on macOS.

At its launch, access to Cowork was intentionally limited. It was available only to subscribers of Claude Max, a plan starting at $100 per person per month, intended for the most intensive uses. At that time, Anthropic acknowledged the experimental nature of the feature, aiming to observe real-world use, identify its limitations, and improve it gradually.

Now, Anthropic is significantly expanding its scope. Cowork is made available to teams through the Team plan, priced at $25 per user per month. However, the company remains cautious and notes that Cowork is still “a research preview.” To guard against unsecured use, Anthropic has launched a support page that outlines the main risks associated with agentive AI and the best practices to adopt, such as limiting permissions, monitoring performed actions, and being vigilant against prompt injection attempts.

To use Cowork, simply open the Claude application on Mac, locate Cowork in the sidebar (enabled by default), and start a conversation to delegate your tasks to the assistant.