FINALLY: AI Can Do Excel and PowerPoint—Get Prompts, Demo, and Full Details on Claude Code Interpreter

When I got to dig into Claude’s latest release I had to check three times to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

Yesterday, I watched Claude build an eight-tab Excel spreadsheet with working VLOOKUP formulas, conditional formatting, and a documentation tab explaining its methodology—in under three minutes. Not a CSV file I had to reformat. Not broken formulas I had to fix. An actual, professional spreadsheet I could send to a colleague without touching a single cell.

Powerpoint? Is that your thing? Claude has you covered there too. It can take complex financial data and turn it into a professional, scannable, properly formatted deck with good narrative flow and interesting business insights your Director would actually want to see. My jaw was on the floor, and you’ll see it in the video.

I went live on video for 40 minutes with my buddy Rod (an AI consultant) to stress-test it. We threw increasingly complex challenges at Claude, and you’ll see how shocked we were live as Claude handled everything we threw at it.

Curious? I packed this with what you need to get started with Claude Code Interpreter (terrible name I agree, but what is new?!):

• The complete 40-minute video where Rod and I discover capabilities we didn't know existed—watch us build pivot tables with heat maps and sparklines Claude adds without being asked

• Master prompt templates you can copy-paste right now to generate professional Excel models and PowerPoint decks (tested on financial models, data analysis, and business presentations)

• The exact Perplexity → Claude workflow that gets superior results—how to use Perplexity to package data, then Claude to build files, with specific examples

• Side-by-side breakdowns of Claude vs Agent Mode showing precisely why one produces usable work and the other produces garbage

• What Claude does automatically so you know what to expect—VLOOKUPs, conditional formatting, documentation tabs, centered text, proper spacing

• Real prompts from real tests including the Oracle valuation model and movie night pivot table, so you can see exactly how to structure requests

• Time savings data—Claude delivered minutes faster than Agent Mode while producing work you won't need to fix

Claude positioned this as a feature announcement and they’re wrong.

This isn't just another feature announcement. If you touch Excel or PowerPoint in your work, you now have templates and techniques to compress days of work into minutes. Actually usable work, not drafts you'll rebuild. It’s a MASSIVE step forward.

Alfred North Whitehead said civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. (The idea being that you can save your thinking for what matters more.)

I feel like it’s a bit cheesy to apply that to AI, but on the other hand that is literally what I witnessed today, and this is going to be a literal 10x game-changer for anyone who works in Excel or PowerPoint for a living. I’m not exaggerating—I used to have to maintain marketing spreadsheets for a living and what I saw out of Claude in 3 minutes would have taken me at least a half day.

So let’s dive in and start figuring out how to use AI for spreadsheets and presentations!