Anthropic takes on Google and Microsoft with Claude Sheets

Anthropic

Anthropic is significantly expanding Claude's suite of productivity tools. At an event in San Francisco today, the company announced Claude Sheets. As you can probably guess, Sheets allows Claude to generate and edit spreadsheets for you. Each file can include its own set of tabs and formulas. You'll also find the usual assortment of formatting options.

Anthropic is billing Sheets as collaborative tool you can use alongside both Claude and your coworkers. Everyone with editing access can make changes to the file, and any tweaks Claude makes will be noted for you and your coworkers to track. You can export any files Claude generates to Excel, and there's even support for Anthropic's Google Workspace plugin. Sheets is currently available in beta to Claude subscribers across the web, desktop and mobile.

Alongside Claude Sheets, Anthropic announced two other new products: Claude Meetings and Claude Whiteboards. The first of those is Anthropic's take on a meeting agent like the kind offered by Otter.ai and other companies. Available in Google Meet to start (which, incidentally, offers its own meeting agent through Gemini), Claude can join your video calls and start taking notes as you and your colleagues talk. You can later chat with Claude about any plans or action items that came up during your call. "Claude marks itself as a participant and posts a notice in the meeting's chat," says Anthropic. "It won't join a call with outside guests unless an admin allows it, and it leaves if one joins anyway." At the moment, Claude Meetings is only available to Team and Enterprise customers.

Moving to Claude Whiteboards, it's a pretty cutesy take on a collaborative brainstorming app. As your team works together, Claude will group everyone's ideas together by theme and draft action items for each individual. In a nifty bit of integration, you can use Claude Meetings and Whiteboards at the same time. Anthropic is billing the tool as a natural extension of how people already use Claude. "Many people already brainstorm with Claude, but sharing the results with coworkers has meant copy-pasting them somewhere else," the company says. Claude Whiteboards is available in beta to all paid users across the web, desktop and mobile.

Separately from those announcements, Anthropic is renaming Claude Dashboards to Claude Data and starting to roll out the tool to all paid users. Anthropic says it decided to rename the app because "companies use their data for more than dashboards." In any case, you can connect Claude Data to your company's CRM so that the chatbot can then answer specific questions you might have about what's inside.

Lastly, Anthropic is upgrading Claude's plugin functionality, which allows you to connect apps like Canva and Notion to the chatbot so it can pull information from those services. As Anthropic notes, there are already more than 9,000 connectors offered through the Claude Marketplace, but now you can open full apps inside of Claude, allowing the chatbot to act on what it sees in the window. Anthropic is rolling out this update starting with a small group of partners that includes Adobe, Atlassian and HubSpot.