Claude for Office

What it is

Microsoft Office add-ins that put Claude inside Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook as a task-pane assistant. Ask questions about the file you’re in, update cells or slides, redline a contract, triage an inbox, and hand context between apps — with citations back to the cell, section, or email the answer came from.

Anthropic calls them the Claude for Microsoft 365 add-ins. Excel, PowerPoint, and Word are generally available on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. Outlook is in beta on the same plans.

Where to find it

You install all four from Microsoft AppSource, not from Claude.

Open the Claude for Microsoft 365 listing on Microsoft AppSource (Outlook has its own Claude for Outlook listing).
Select Get it now.
Open the Office app and sign in with your Claude account the first time the pane loads.

On desktop

Excel, PowerPoint, Word: activate the add-in from Home → Add-ins on Windows or Tools → Add-ins on Mac. The pane opens beside your document.
Outlook: open any email and select the Claude button in the message ribbon. If it isn’t there, open the overflow menu on the reading pane, choose Customize actions, and tick Claude under Apps.
Windows needs a Microsoft 365 subscription build; Mac needs Office 16.46 or later (16.61 for Word). Perpetual and volume licences of Office 2016 and 2019 are not supported, and neither are the iPad or Android versions.

On the web

The same add-ins run in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook on the web, with one exception: dictation needs the desktop apps.
Outlook on the web needs a mailbox on Exchange Online; on-premises Exchange is not supported.

Team and Enterprise admins can push the add-ins out through Settings → Integrated apps in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, which also needs Let users access the Office Store turned on. Where the Office Store is blocked, Anthropic publishes a manifest XML file per app to upload instead. Claude for Outlook additionally needs a one-time Microsoft Graph admin consent before anyone can use it.

How to use it

Excel

Open a workbook and launch the Claude pane.
Ask about a sheet — “Walk me through how the revenue number in cell C42 is calculated”, “What assumptions drive the gross margin forecast?”
Answers come with cell-level citations you can click to jump to the referenced cell.
Ask for changes. Claude updates values while keeping formula relationships intact so downstream cells recompute, and warns you before overwriting existing data.
It can also sort, filter, edit pivot tables, apply conditional formatting, and add data-validation dropdowns.

PowerPoint

Open a deck — ideally with your template already applied — and launch the pane.
Ask Claude to build a section, edit one slide, or restructure a storyline.
Claude reads the slide master, layouts, fonts, and colour scheme and generates slides that match them.
Bullets can become diagrams, process flows, or native, editable PowerPoint charts rather than flat images.

Word

Open a document and launch the pane.
Ask questions and get answers with clickable section citations, or select a passage and say what to change — surrounding styles, numbering, and formatting are preserved.
Turn on tracked changes mode and Claude’s edits land as revisions you accept or reject in Word’s own review pane.
Claude can work through comment threads one by one, editing the anchored text and replying to say what it did, and can summarise what a counterparty changed in a redline.

Outlook

Open an email and select Claude in the message ribbon.
Ask “What needs me?” and Claude sorts unread mail into what needs you, what it can handle, and what’s noise.
Ask for a reply. Drafts land unsent in Outlook’s compose pane — the add-in never requests permission to send, so you always click Send yourself.
It can summarise long threads with per-email citations, read .docx and .xlsx attachments inline, find meeting times, and draft invites into Outlook’s appointment form.

Good to know

Dictation is desktop-only. Click the microphone on the right of the chat input, speak — the placeholder changes to “Listening…” — and click again to stop, or press Enter to stop and send. Audio is streamed to Anthropic, transcribed, and not retained. Office on the web can’t offer it because browser-hosted add-ins can’t reach the microphone, and it isn’t available to organisations connecting through a third-party platform.
Working across apps is opt-in. Open Settings in each add-in and turn on Let Claude work across files. Pro and Max have it on by default; Team and Enterprise default to off, and an owner controls it org-wide under Organization settings → Office agents → Let Claude work across apps. Claude can only read and write files that are already open — it can’t open, close, or switch files itself.
Persistent instructions are per app. Settings → Instructions in the add-in applies to every conversation in that app only; your Excel instructions don’t carry into Word.
Third-party platforms mean your own inference path, not other file formats. Organisations routing AI traffic through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry, or an LLM gateway can deploy the add-ins without individual Claude accounts. Dictation and cross-app mode don’t work on that path.
Models are a curated subset. The add-ins offer the models that work best for Office tasks, so the list is shorter than in Claude, and your organisation’s model-access settings still apply.
Usage counts against your Claude plan — the add-ins draw from the same pool as chat and Claude Code. Long conversations auto-compact into new ones rather than running out of context.
Treat external files as untrusted. Downloaded templates, vendor files, and counterparty documents can carry hidden prompt-injection instructions. Claude asks you to confirm risky operations; read those confirmations rather than clicking through.
Chat history is local. Conversations live in your browser’s IndexedDB, aren’t stored on Anthropic’s servers, aren’t synced across devices, and can be cleared from Settings.
Not for unreviewed deliverables. Anthropic explicitly doesn’t recommend the add-ins for final client work, audit-critical calculations, or litigation filings without human review.

What’s changed recently

2026-09-13 — All six help articles moved from support.claude.com to claude.com/docs/office-agents/*, and the product is now documented as Claude for Microsoft 365. Three substantive changes: Excel, PowerPoint, and Word left beta and are generally available; a fourth add-in, Claude for Outlook, has shipped in beta; and “third-party platforms” turns out to mean Bedrock / Vertex AI / Azure AI Foundry / LLM-gateway deployment, not Google Workspace files — we had that wrong and have removed it. Install is via Microsoft AppSource (“Get it now”), not an in-app Add-ins → Add search. Dictation is confirmed desktop-only.