Claude for Microsoft 365: Two Ways to Handle Email and Excel

Every Monday I watch the same scene play out in class. Somebody opens Outlook, scrolls past sixty weekend messages, and says out loud, “I just need to know what I actually have to do today.” An hour later that same person is fixing columns by hand in a spreadsheet some other system exported, before the real work can even start.

That is the real Microsoft 365 workday, and ribbon shortcuts do not fix it. What helps is handing the reading, summarizing and formula-writing to something that does not get tired. That is where Claude for Microsoft 365 earns its keep. It is not a button inside Word or Excel — it is a separate assistant you keep open next to Office, and you feed it the parts of the job that are really just text and patterns.

Here are the two things I show people first, because they pay off the same day you learn them.

Claude for Microsoft 365, Step One: Turn a Week of Outlook Into a Short Decision List

A twenty-message thread is not information. It is a pile you have to dig through to find the two sentences that matter. Here is the exact move:

• In Outlook, open the thread and click Forward. Forwarding pulls the whole chain into one message body, which is what you want — if you only copy the message on top, you lose every commitment anyone made earlier.
• Click in the body, press Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C. Close the draft without sending it.
• Paste it into Claude and type this underneath:

Below is a full email thread. Tell me: (1) what decision is being asked of me, (2) what each person has already committed to and by when, (3) every date or deadline mentioned, and (4) a three-sentence reply I can send that moves this forward. If something important is missing from the thread, list the questions I should ask instead of guessing at an answer.

What comes back is not a summary in the usual sense — it is a list you can act on. The fourth item saves the most time: a draft reply that already reflects what everybody said, instead of a blank message.

The gotcha: Claude only knows what you paste. Forward the whole chain, not the last reply, or you will get a confident answer built on half the story. And use your head about what goes in: if your employer classifies the content as restricted, that policy applies here the same as it does to any other outside tool. Customer names and contract numbers are worth stripping out before you paste.

Clean a Messy Excel Export Without Guessing at the Formula

The second one is for the export nobody wants to deal with: names jammed into one column, dates stored as text, amounts with dollar signs in front of them so nothing will add up.

Save the sheet as .xlsx or .csv, attach it to Claude with the paperclip, and ask for the fix in plain language:

This is an export from our billing system, about 4,000 rows. I need the Name column split into first and last, the Date column converted into real Excel dates, and the Amount column stripped of dollar signs and stored as numbers. Give me the exact formula for each one, tell me which cell to put it in, and give me a fallback version for anyone still on Excel 2019.

You will usually get TEXTSPLIT, TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER for the name column, DATEVALUE for the dates, and SUBSTITUTE wrapped in VALUE for the amounts — plus the older LEFT/RIGHT/FIND versions if you asked for the fallback. That is the part people lose twenty minutes to, handed over with the cell references spelled out.

If this export lands on your desk every month, ask one more question: Now give me the same cleanup as Power Query steps instead of formulas. Build it once in Get & Transform, and next month the whole thing is a single click on Refresh.

The gotcha: a formula that works on the rows Claude saw can still break on row 3,112. Wrap the result in IFERROR, then sort the new column to pull blanks and errors to the top and look at them. And run it all on a copy of the file, not the original — that rule has not changed in thirty years.

Plenty more on the calendar

If you want to see all of this done live, with questions answered as they come up, I am running a 3-hour virtual seminar on Using Claude To Be More Productive in Microsoft 365 on Monday, October 12. We go well past these two tips — Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the prompts that actually work, and the places where Claude will steer you wrong if you are not watching.

Registration is open, and the full current schedule sits on the front page of PCWebinars.com, with new dates going up as they get confirmed. Register for this one, or browse the list and pick the session that fits the software you live in all day.

About your trainer

I’m Tom Fragale. I have been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I have taught well over 30,000 people how to get more out of the software they already own — Excel, Access, Power BI, Word, Outlook, and now the AI tools that sit on top of all of it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. My background is applied, not theoretical. Alongside teaching, I build real databases and reporting systems for clients in Excel, Access, and Power BI, so the examples I use in class are the problems I ran into last week, not textbook exercises. I also publish free tutorials on YouTube and longer courses online.

If any of that sounds like the kind of help you need, the full schedule and the rest of the training catalog are waiting at PCWebinars.com.