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Claude Skills for Excel

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Build reusable workflows in Claude and the Claude for Excel add-in

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Create reusable AI skills in Claude using plain language
  • Trigger skills within Claude and Claude for Excel
  • Get data from external data sources by connecting skills to connectors
  • Apply skills to real Excel tasks including data cleaning, transformation, and summarization
  • Share skills with colleagues to scale AI-assisted workflows across a team
  • Work with Excel templates within skills to produce consistent, repeatable outputs

Course description

AI prompts can be incredibly helpful for one-off tasks, but if you want to repeat them as part of your regular workflow, you need a more powerful approach. Excel expert Dawn Griffiths shows you how to capture your unique logic and turn it into reusable, custom AI skills without writing a single line of code. You’ll learn how to build and use these tools with plain language and discover how to create, manage, and refine them to match the exact way you work.

Using Claude and the Claude for Excel add-in, you’ll bring this AI power directly into your daily environment to solve real spreadsheet headaches like cleaning messy datasets, restructuring tables, and generating instant summaries. You’ll also learn how to incorporate templates, share your skills, and even extend them by connecting to external data. You’ll come away with everything you need to build a custom toolkit of AI skills, saving you hours of manual effort.

This live event is for you because...

  • You use Excel regularly and want to save time on repetitive tasks like cleaning, formatting, or summarizing data.
  • You’ve tried Claude or another AI assistant but want to go beyond one-off questions and build something reusable.
  • You want to create powerful AI automations without writing code.

Prerequisites

  • A computer with a working copy of Microsoft Excel, preferably Excel 365 on Windows
  • A Claude subscription and access to the Claude for Excel add-in
  • Basic familiarity with Microsoft Excel, such as working with worksheets and tables

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Introduction to Claude skills (20 minutes)

  • Presentation and demos: Using Claude for one-off prompts; about skills; prompts that use Excel skills
  • Exercises: Explore using one-off prompts and skills
  • Q&A

Creating custom skills (40 minutes)

  • Presentation and demos: When and how to create custom skills; calling custom skills; viewing custom skills; disabling skills
  • Hands-on exercises: Create, view, and run custom skills
  • Q&A
  • Break

Refining custom skills (30 minutes)

  • Presentation and demos: Updating skills; specifying when a skill is triggered; incorporating Excel templates; extending skills with connectors; sharing skills
  • Hands-on exercises: Update custom skills
  • Q&A

Skills in Claude for Excel (30 minutes)

  • Presentation and demos: About the Claude for Excel add-in; using skills in Claude for Excel; creating skills in Claude for Excel
  • Hands-on exercises: Create and explore skills in Claude for Excel
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

Dawn Griffiths

Dawn Griffiths is an author and trainer with over 20 years of experience using Excel. Her most recent book is Excel Cookbook, and she’s also written several books in the Head First series, including Head First Statistics, _Head First Android Development, and Head First Kotlin. Dawn also developed the animated video course The Agile Sketchpad with her husband, David, to teach key concepts and techniques in a way that keeps your brain active and engaged.

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Skill covered

Microsoft Excel