Claude just started handing you finished files, not advice
Finally, an AI that ships excel and powerpoint slides, not just vibes.
This morning, I asked Claude to turn the messy pipeline notes into a clean client update: one Word document for email, a three-slide summary for the Board, and a spreadsheet that totals by region with a quick variance view. Ten minutes later, I was able to download a .docx, a .pptx, and an .xlsx file that actually worked. No copy-paste loop. No “paste into Excel and fix the formulas.” It felt like the first time you hand someone a problem and they hand you back a deliverable, not a paragraph.
What shipped this week: Claude can now create and edit files directly in chat, including Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slide decks, Word-style documents, and PDFs. It runs in Claude.ai and the desktop app. For now, it is a preview for Max, Team, and Enterprise, with Pro getting access next.
If you are a business leader, here is what that actually means. You can say, “Clean this CSV, build a model with three growth scenarios, chart it, then write a one-page brief that explains what changed quarter over quarter,” and Claude returns the spreadsheet with working formulas, a PDF report with charts, and a slide or two for the meeting. That is not a toy. It is work. And it lands right inside your downloads folder or straight to Google Drive if you prefer. Supported types today are .xlsx, .pptx, .docx, and .pdf, with a 30 MB per-file limit.
Under the hood, Claude spins up a private computer environment. Think of it as a little rented laptop behind the scenes that can run Python and common libraries to build files, then hand them back to you. You turn it on in Settings, then guide it like you would a junior analyst. There is a security note here: since that environment can fetch packages and touch connected data, admins and users should monitor what it is doing and keep the feature off for sensitive work unless you have policies around it. The toggle and the warnings are built in.
I tested it on three everyday jobs:
Finance: “Build a 12-month cash model with base, high, and low cases. Flag months where cash drops below $2.5M.” Claude returned a workbook with scenario tabs and conditional formatting that actually triggered where it should. I changed two labels, and it was ready to be shipped.
Sales: “Turn these call notes into a 3-slide update for the board.” It created a short deck with the right headline-support structure and a slide of asks. I swapped a chart type, done. It could even format the slides based on an uploaded template (no other LLM I’ve worked with can do this).
Ops: “Convert this vendor contract PDF into a summary memo with a one-page appendix of renewal terms in a table.” It produced a clean .docx with a table I could edit.
This is what coding agents already do for engineers, now expanding to knowledge work. You describe the outcome, the agent does the assembly, and you review and tune. The interesting part is the speed: it compresses a half-day of nudging into a short back and forth.
How it stacks up right now
Others are circling this, but they are not quite here in general chat yet. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent (launched July 17) can already generate downloadable PowerPoint decks and Excel spreadsheets - and edit spreadsheets - in ChatGPT. It’s rolling out across paid tiers, but today it doesn’t cover Word/PDF the way Claude’s new flow does. It also generates far more errors in every scenario I’ve run compared to Claude. Google’s Gemini can work with Google native docs (docs) - but can’t create Excel, PowerPoint, or Word files. Perplexity is rolling out tools to draft spreadsheets and dashboards, too, again, not the same “chat to .pptx/.xlsx/.docx/.pdf” handoff Anthropic just shipped. I have been running the same prompts in all three products (excluding Gemini) and will share the results soon (TLDR: Claude delivers!).
So if your question is, “Can anyone else do this this way today,” the honest answer is that Anthropic is first to ship a unified, four-format file-creation/editing flow (.xlsx/.pptx/.docx/.pdf) in the main Claude app - with direct Google Drive save - for Pro, business, and enterprise users. OpenAI’s Agent currently covers Excel/PowerPoint today, while Google’s and Perplexity’s tools operate within their respective ecosystems. That is the difference I felt in my tests.
Where to point it on day one
Board and client updates: Tell Claude the audience, the decision you need, and the three messages you want to land. Ask for a short deck and a companion memo. Fit it on four slides, upload your corporate template, no jargon, readable charts.
Quarterly sales roll-ups: Drop your raw export. Ask for a tidy model with cohort views, a pipeline aging lens, and a variance table versus plan. Have it write the readout in a one-page PDF.
Hiring plans and budgets: Describe the roles, start dates, and target comp bands. Get an .xlsx with drivers you can tweak and a sensitivity tab for headcount slips.
Give it your structure, then ask it to “walk me through what you did” so you can spot errors. It is fast, not magic.
Admin and risk basics
If you run a team, you control whether the feature is on for your org, and users must opt in. There are clear callouts about prompt-injection risks and a recommendation to monitor the agent’s actions. That is the right posture. Pilot it on non-sensitive tasks first, set a naming convention for outputs, and decide where files should be stored, either locally or on the Drive.
What this signals
We are watching the center of office work tilt. The last wave was “better drafts.” This next wave is “finished files that survive contact with the meeting.” The bar moves from writing good paragraphs to returning package-ready deliverables, fast, in the formats your clients and teams already use. Today, that is Claude, right inside chat, handing you .xlsx, .pptx, .docx, and .pdf without the paste dance. It will not replace judgment, negotiation, or taste. It will erase a lot of drudgery between the brief and the send button.
If you try one thing, try this: pick a recurring deliverable on your plate this week, give Claude the goal, the audience, and a sample, then ask for the file back. You will know in fifteen minutes whether this saves you an afternoon.
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