The Core: In this guide, you will do a quick exercise that teaches you how to use Claude as a spreadsheet architect, taking 5+ messy CSVs and watching Claude handle data cleaning, table formatting, color-coding, and more.
Step-by-step:
- Install Claude’s Excel app from the Microsoft Marketplace. For this example, we used a year’s worth of SEO data, but you can use sales data, receipts, etc
- In Excel, click the Claude button and prompt “I have [data type] data from [sources] for my website/brand/team. Make a plan to rename each tab and clean the data up to make it more readable”. Then, edit and approve the plan
- Once done, ask Claude to make a plan for the master dashboard tab: “Based on all tabs, what’s the best way to tie this data into a Master Dashboard?”
- Finally, you can ask Claude to visualize data with prompts like “Create a combo chart for Clicks vs. Average Position”
Pro tip: Asking Claude to review the data and create a plan improves its output significantly compared to asking it to get started immediately.