Anthropic Comes for Microsoft Office: Claude Gets Sheets, Whiteboards and a Seat in Your Meetings

Anthropic opened its IPO roadshow on Tuesday by launching software that competes directly with Microsoft Office.

At 9:26 a.m. PT, Claude's account on X announced the rollout of Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards and Claude Data. Anthropic also announced Claude Meetings, which joins Google Meet calls and starts on tasks during the call, and interactive connectors that open partner apps such as Adobe and Atlassian inside Claude. Microsoft shares dropped 3% after the news, CNBC reported.

In its announcement, Anthropic said Claude had changed how developers work over the past year, with engineers handing it whole tasks instead of asking for snippets of code. The company now wants the same thing to happen in other departments.

What Anthropic shipped

Claude Sheets builds spreadsheets, like trackers and budgets, that teams can keep editing together with Claude. They support tabs, formulas and dropdowns and can be exported to Excel. Claude Whiteboards turns a planning conversation into a shared board with timelines and action items. Both are in beta for paid plans on the web, desktop and mobile.

Claude Data, previously called Claude Dashboards, is now generally available on paid plans. It connects to a company's CRM and data warehouse and answers questions with dashboards, written summaries or narrated videos. Anthropic told Engadget it renamed the product because companies use their data for more than dashboards.

Interactive connectors are also generally available. They let users open full versions of partner apps inside a Claude conversation. Axios listed Adobe, Atlassian and HubSpot as partners, and other outlets reported Box and Notion as well.

Claude takes a seat in the meeting

For most employees, Meetings will be the most visible change. Teams can add Claude to a Google Meet call, where it appears in the participant list. According to Reuters, it follows the conversation, answers questions in the meeting chat, pulls numbers from connected apps and drafts plans and timelines during the call. Notes, action items and anything Claude made are saved in Claude afterward. Meetings also works with Whiteboards, so a team can finish a planning call with the board already filled in.

Claude posts a notice in the chat when it joins. By default it stays out of calls that include outside guests, and it leaves if an outside guest joins. Admins can change that setting.

Meetings is in beta for Team and Enterprise customers. It works with Google Meet for now, and Anthropic plans to add other platforms. It isn't clear yet whether customers can use it today. Claude's rollout post on X mentioned only Sheets, Whiteboards and Data, and at least one outlet reported that the meeting assistant would arrive in a later release.

Nicholas Lin, who leads Anthropic's knowledge work products, told Axios the company has been testing Meetings internally for about two months. He said Claude now attends nearly all of Anthropic's meetings. It mostly waits for instructions today, and Lin said Anthropic plans to make it more proactive.

Office and Workspace are the target

Anthropic's announcement doesn't mention Microsoft or Google by name, but the overlap is clear. Spreadsheets, whiteboards, dashboards and video calls are central to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and both companies have been adding AI to those apps through Copilot and Gemini. Engadget pointed out that Google Meet already offers a Gemini meeting agent. Claude will now be joining those calls too.

Excel may have the most to lose. Because Claude Sheets exports to Excel, teams can try it without migrating anything. That same feature lets them do the work in Claude and open Excel only to send the final file.

Atlassian and monday.com are exposed too

Microsoft and Google aren't the only software companies with a stake in this launch. Atlassian and monday.com sell the tools teams use to plan projects, assign tasks and track deadlines. Claude Whiteboards turns a planning discussion into timelines and action items for each person, and Claude Sheets builds trackers. A lot of teams do that same work today in Jira, Confluence or a monday.com board.

Atlassian is in an awkward spot. It's one of the first partners for Anthropic's interactive connectors, so its apps now open inside Claude, Engadget reported. That puts Atlassian in front of Claude's users, but it also lets those users work in Atlassian's software without leaving Claude.

monday.com already has a verified connector in Claude's directory that lets Claude create tasks, turn meeting content into tasks and flag overdue work across boards. It wasn't named among the launch partners for interactive connectors.

For both companies, the open question is whether a plan drawn on a Claude whiteboard during a Claude meeting ever gets copied into Jira or monday.com. The connectors keep them in the workflow, but possibly as the system where Claude files the work after the planning has already happened somewhere else.

Investors have punished software stocks over Anthropic launches before. Its enterprise products sent shares of Salesforce, ServiceNow and Intuit sharply lower earlier this year, Yahoo Finance reported. For now, the overlap is limited. Lin described Sheets as "fairly basic" and said it isn't meant for work like financial modeling, according to The Next Web.

Launch day was also roadshow day

Anthropic made the announcement as it started marketing its IPO to investors. Yahoo Finance reported that shares are expected to start trading on Nov. 19 or 20, at a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion. Last week we reported that some prospective buyers were already pushing back on a $1.5 trillion target.

Anthropic's coding tools won over developers. Office tools let it pitch investors on every other department as well, and the company launched them on the first day of the roadshow.

What it means for teams on Office and Workspace

Most of these products are still in beta, and few companies will stop using Excel this quarter. The first decisions for IT and legal teams will be about governance. If an AI is going to join internal calls, companies need rules on which meetings it attends and who can read its notes. Admins can already keep it out of calls with outside guests, but everything else is up to each company.

Teams should also expect files to start living in two places. A budget built in Claude Sheets and exported to Excel exists in both, so companies will need to decide which version is the official one.

Our take

Anthropic built its reputation with developers. With this launch it's going after the rest of the company, on the same day it began selling its shares.

The products are early. Three of the five launches are in beta, and Meetings only works in Google Meet. Microsoft and Google still control the files, calendars and logins that most companies depend on. Anthropic is trying to get employees to start their work in Claude without asking companies to replace any of those systems, and Meetings puts Claude where teams already spend much of their day.

Atlassian and monday.com face a smaller version of the same problem. Their connectors keep them inside Claude, but the planning that used to start in their apps can now start in a Claude meeting.

If employees get used to that, more work will happen in Claude, and Excel will be where the final file goes. Microsoft's investors appeared to be weighing that risk on Tuesday.

Microsoft lost 3% on a beta.