[lateforwork]

This looks bad for Microsoft. They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.

I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.

Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.

[nsiemsen]

Claude for excel is already amazing. Fully capable of doing junior work. Formatting is great. Can refactor large multi-tab spreadsheets. It just burns tokens. If OpenAI is going to subsidize this on the monthly enterprise plans for a while then it's a game changer.

Claude for Excel (I work in finance) was one of the absolutely critical reasons we added Anthropic enterprise licenses. But they've turned out to be quite expensive ($100/day for heavy users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.

[intended]

How’s that been in practice ? From what I’ve been following - Claude in finance results in models with errors that an analyst won’t make.

You get models that are formatted and structured and which balance - but there are errors introduced which an analyst / human wouldn’t make.

Stuff like hard coded values, or incorrect cell logic which guarantees the model balances.

[mukmuk]

From my experience, LLM performance in these areas is being massively oversold. I have repeatedly tried using Claude to modify a range of models typical of investment banking / private equity / sellside research contexts, and the results have been generally disastrous. On multiple occasions, the xlsx would no longer open.

[balderdash]

Just my experience, it’s not a solution but rather a productivity tool. I mostly use it for tasks I can do myself but it would probably take 20-30min to dial in - now Claude can do it in 2-3min. (E.g. in a data table - add a new column that checks column a if the data is a, do x, if the data is b, do y, if the data is c, do z - then combine that with the word after the hyphen in column b —- or another example —- create a new sheet that is the same format as sheet one but show calculates the difference between column a and b bot for sheets 1-12 in a summary)

I don’t get good results when I just have Claude build things on its own - but for these types of specific productivity tasks I can save a couple of hours here and there.

[wouldbecouldbe]

I work with large files a lot, running claude code on it is not token intense at all. Probably because it does a lot with scripts. But its a bit more raw, but i think in the end more powerful. Have to pick a good excel library and language. I do node, maybe python can work as well

[infecto]

Work in a firm similar to yours and we have been going to though the motions of figuring ways for the bullpen to make use of these tools and would love to hear your thoughts if you would be willing to share!

[p_ing]

Cheaper to get M365 Copilot licenses for the Claude models in Excel.

[jxmesth]

I tried looking this up but wasn't able to find info on this on Microsoft's website. Do you have a link for this?

[p_ing]

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/choose-your-model-...

[jxmesth]

Thanks!

[WillAdams]

What are the costs on that?

Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?

[p_ing]

$200-something per user per year. Will vary based on license type and seat count.

No limits.

[mastermage]

Well other than the limits of Copilots usefullness.

[croes]

> No limits.

Yet.

[codeugo]

lol

[brian-jones]

I run the Excel team at Microsoft. The experience you're describing sounds like it's from the earlier versions of Copilot in Excel that were genuinely limited.

Today, Excel Copilot takes a model-forward approach where we give the models full access to Excel's capabilities. We give customers the choice of the latest models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, and we encourage the models to iteratively explore the spreadsheet before taking action. It builds a full understanding of the semantics and structure of the spreadsheet, find issues in it, and ultimately gives you much better results.

Copilot can write formulas, build PivotTables, create charts, build multi-tab models, do multi-step analysis. The models are quite proficient at it, and they do a great job. We have an auto-mode which is the default where we pick the model for you, but you can also select specific models if you have a preference. I often see people switch between models to get the benefit of diverse perspectives, similar to how a diverse team approaches problems differently.

If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth another look.

[drc500free]

Does Copilot behave differently in Excel depending on whether you got the premium subscription instead of what is included with Business?

Many people I've talked to about Copilot don't realize that the dedicated "Premium" Copilot is a completely different experience than the "Basic/Lobotomized" Copilot that comes with a standard Business subscription.

It's like you're running a freemium model where no one was actually responsible for implementing the upsell, or making sure the free version is useful and compelling. E.g. a Copilot pane in Outlook that says it can't access your emails, doesn't explain how, and doesn't mention an upgrade path that will allow it to.

[dgsegesg]

Current model is inauthentically limited?

"If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth another look." You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then?

[sqircles]

> You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then?

:s/You/MS

While I agree the widespread "race to market" with crap probably does and should hurt the success of these "AI-enabled apps," that particular area probably was not this individuals decision.

[shrdhdrhrdsh]

It was this person's decision to mention their senior role at MS then dump marketing drivel into our heads. It's not his hand but he still eats with it.

[Abster1]

I've had a really good time with the new Copilot in Excel. I like the model selector and tend to use Opus 4.6.

Q for you Brian, I have the Microsoft 365 Premium individual plan ($200/yr). I got 50% off the premium plan as well when Microsoft was offering discounts.

I've noticed when I use Claude or GPT through the Copilot model selector I don't see any costs for my api usage anywhere. Does Microsoft eat that for now?

[brian-jones]

Glad you're enjoying it! Opus 4.6 is great, and we've started rolling out 4.7 today.

Your M365 Copilot Premium plan includes extensive usage of the Copilot features, including the model selector, and there are no additional API costs.

[rdedev]

Thanks for clarifying this. I was genuinely frustrated with copilot due to the lack of features.

If it's possible please push your large business clients to update office. I work for a multinational pharma company and the copilot feature in excel deployed there is next to useless

[arbitrary_name]

just tried it: i can't even use CSV files with Copilot...

Without coming across as overly rude, it is frankly astonishing how limited Copilot is.

I do not like being an MS customer or user.

[evanjrowley]

There is a significant difference in experience between Copilot Basic for a M365 user whose IT admins have blocked integration capabilities with Sharepoint content vs Copilot Premium for a M365 user whose IT admins have allowed integration capabilities with Sharepoint content.

[interroboink]

A recent funny story on this topic: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231

[mohamedkoubaa]

Microsoft is better off not allowing copilot basic because of the reputational harm it will do. Not that they are thinking through copilot rationally

[basch]

it was a good name when chosen. too bad they have burned bob, clippy, cortana, sydney, and copilot already.

[alternatex]

The backend of Copilot is still called Sydney AFAIK

[compass_copium]

Don't forget Tay!

[brookst]

PowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications that AI totally obsoletes:

* A large application whose outputs are independent of the all (people still print slides; when presenting nobody knows or cares what app was used) * Complicated and requires users to learn lots of skills unrelated to the work they’re doing (compare to Excel, where the model and calculations require and reflect domain knowledge about the data) * Practically zero value add in document / info management (compare to word where large documents benefit from structure and organization)

We’re pretty close to presentations just being image files without layers and objects and smartart and all that.

AI will come for all productivity tools, but PowerPoint will be the canary that gets snuffed first, and soon.

[HongKongPhooey]

I recall reading comments like this when PowerPoint was invented as it would kill all graphic design jobs. The absolute reverse happened. It created an entirely new industry. There is no AI today, or in the near future, that can combine human emotive story telling with impactful design, animated flow and interactivity. Yes it can create flattened boring 'documents' with no passion or depth. I for one would never want to be asked to stand in front of an audience and actually have to present a deck created by Copilot or Claude. Feast your eyes on this PowerPoint creation made by very talented real human designers and ask yourself the question "How long before AI can do this?" https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partners...

[brookst]

Wait, how does PowerPoint do emotive storytelling in a way that a human driving an AI tool could not?

It sounds like you’re confusing my argument that AI can replace PowerPoint tools like gradient, layers, fonts, etc, with an argument I did not make that AI will take humans out of the equation.

[LuxBennu]

Chatgpt for Excel is still an office add-in running in the same sandbox though. strongpigeon described the exact bottleneck upthread, process boundary crossings, context.sync() roundtrips that take seconds on web. That's a platform limitation, not a model limitation. Swapping AI behind the add-in doesn't fix the fundamental constraint that third-party add-ins can't deeply integrate with Excel's runtime the way a native feature can. If copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-in with less access is likely not be better.

[angadsg]

Would love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel. Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT for Excel does really well on complex sheets.

[com2kid]

There is an irony here that this would be more performant with a 2002 coding model. A native plugin, COM, OLE, whatever. C++, crash prone, but fast.

[strongpigeon]

Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency.

That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.

[screye]

If AI winning means that data center companies win out, then the wins for Azure will more than make up for the death of Office.

I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far behind though.

[boringg]

Aren't they providing a wrapper for the work of another company? IE msft isn't actually doing any foundational work thus they can't meaningfully move product capability, just wait for the model to improve and integrate it?

[sarreph]

> This looks bad for Microsoft.

Maybe(?) from a product catalogue perspective... But from a strategic perspective less so because they own ~27% of OpenAI.[0]

[0] - https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-openai-pa...

[Handy-Man]

You have to use the "agent" toggle for Copilot to behave the same way lol. Otherwise its pretty simple chat interface with the context, that's all.

[vessenes]

Microsoft has rights to all this IP. So, it might look bad for their product folks, but for the corporation this is great, to the extent it works.

[giancarlostoro]

I am still surprised that outside of open source AI models, Microsoft is just routing to external models, to a degree its kind of smart because they don't have to have all the skin in the game for the infrastructure, plus they sell some of the hosting anyway, but man. Why does Microsoft not have a frontier model yet? Would have been a great time any time in the last few years to introduce a real Cortana AI model.

[ebiester]

They explicitly said they were ceding the frontier model game to others, and that they were content saying a few months behind the state of the art. In the long run, this is an interesting freeloader play that a few people are making. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-bene...

[leetharris]

I will say this in the most charitable terms I can. Microsoft simply does not have it in their culture to compete with something like this. Their prime days are over. They are slowly becoming IBM.

They were completely correct to not compete in foundation models. They would have no chance. I mean, they can't even make a decent app or harness to use the other models!

[Gareth321]

> They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.

I was hyped when I heard about Copilot. "I can tell it to make pivot tables now!" When I tried to use it I was shocked how underbaked it was. Below even my worst expectations. This really was someone shoving ChatGPT into Excel with almost zero additional effort. Copilot can't DO anything useful.

[chris_money202]

stride.microsoft.com -> this is a virtual machine instance with developer tools that allow for same sort of work Claude cowork does. Copilot in excel has to access the excel document through excel provided APIs and can’t completely redo the document like cowork does everytime running developer scripts to generate it because the document instance is open. The model of work is entirely different.

[vipipiccf]

I've had the same experience. Copilot for Excel can't even parse basic cell references. Meanwhile Claude handles document formatting in one pass. The catch is it works externally, not inside the app, but at least it works.

The MCP ecosystem is what makes this interesting. Claude isn't just a chat panel bolted onto existing software, it's building integrations that actually manipulate the files. Microsoft had the distribution advantage but they're losing on capability.

[chris_money202]

stride.microsoft.com -> microsoft has this stuff you just don’t know it unless you are an M365 power user

[compass_copium]

I would consider myself an M365 power user and I was not aware of this. It is not well promoted--and after all the Copilot crap, I would be annoyed even if it was.

Regardless, I just tried to log in with my work MS account, and I can't do so.

[chris_money202]

Enterprise is Copilot Cowork one of the frontier agents. Has to be enabled by your organization I believe

[bko]

Maybe a dumb question, but why does Microsoft care? They should have good apps and if OpenAI or Claude wants to create plugins, great. That's what they're there for and Microsoft invested a lot of effort to make the new add-ins much more powerful and intuitive for this very reason. It's really nice experience compared to VBA.

It obv makes Excel much more valuable and they can gatekeep by requiring the subscription for addins.

[Centigonal]

Microsoft spent a lot of effort to develop a really powerful editing interface. If you can replace that interface with a text input box, then their applications moat becomes a lot shallower.

[ryanjshaw]

There’s a magic button you have to press to make it integrate fully. Everybody is confused about why this isn’t the default behavior.

[ebbi]

We have many people in my wider team (Finance) that are AI skeptics purely because of their experience with Copilot. Like they don't know what AI is actually capable of when outside of the shackles of Copilot.

Microsoft fumbled so badly here.

[bwat49]

its baffling how badly microsoft has handled copilot, this is exactly what copilot in office should have been

[xeyownt]

it would be bad for Microsoft if that would use Calc on LibreOffice.

[chris_money202]

stride.microsoft.com is the cowork equivalent I believe.

[p_ing]

Only for personal accounts. Enterprise customers have a Frontier agent called Copilot Cowork via the M365 Copilot app.... copilot.

[thesuperevil]

That’s right lol

[miohtama]

It's called Microslop for a reason.

[d3Xt3r]

> I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.

Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all you need is a browser.

PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.

[hgoel]

Powerpoint will continue to persist because other people need to be able to edit your slide deck without understanding your HTML.

My employer blocks office plugins, so I can't try Claude for PowerPoint, but sometimes I get Claude to generate Python scripts, which produce PowerPoint slides via python-pptx. This also benefits from being able to easily read and generate figures from raw data.

I don't really like the way Claude tends to format slides (too much marketing speak and flowcharts), but it has good ideas often enough that it's still worth it to me. So I treat this as a starting point and replace the bad parts.

[basch]

Or you could just talk to powerpoint, which creates a self contained pptx, which also plays anywhere.

we've hit this point where its cool to have claude reinvent every wheel just because it can.

[d3Xt3r]

It's not self-contained, it requires PowerPoint to be indfled. Which is not an issue on corporate machines of course, but maybe you want to do a presentation for a general/broader audience.

[alternatex]

Office, or rather Microsoft 365 applications have had web versions for a decade now.

[d3Xt3r]

That's besides the point though. With a self-contained HTML, you don't need to go to a special website, you don't need an account or sign-in, heck you don't even need the Internet, and it works pretty much on every device that supports HTML5.

[basch]

a solution in search of a problem. everyone can open a powerpoint in google docs, hotmail, libreoffice etc.

now the person receiving the file has a DIFFERENT experience than they are used to with every other presentation. different hotkeys, different troubleshooting.

[jason_zig]

I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...

[DrSAR]

hrm, double-click and your browser does the rest.

For added benefit, full screen?

Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.

[raincole]

You mean like, double-click?

[apsurd]

you must never have actually done this. it doesn't work the way you think it does. unless it's self contained (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually deliver when you need it most.

[d3Xt3r]

The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully self-contained, no network access is needed.

[apsurd]

that's pretty cool!

[apsurd]

you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated slides as a medium for anything, but i've been proven wrong tine and again that people love their pp.

[bad_haircut72]

Because it was drag and drop interface. This existed for HTML but because web pages got too complicated, so did the WYSIWYGs. By just being a program to show slides, the editing experience was manageable for anyone. But if you can hust type what you want to happen into claude, editng experience doesnt matter as much/at all

[usrme]

I'd love to get a link to that comment/post!

[d3Xt3r]

https://github.com/shawnzam/keynot