I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.
The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".
This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.
For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.
Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!
> Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.
Based on the history of digitalization of businesses from the 1980s onwards, the spreadsheets will just balloon in number and size and there will be more rules and more procedures and more forms and reports to file until the efficiency gains are neutralized (or almost neutralized).
We'll hit a new plateau somewhere, for sure. Still, I'm glad I'm not doing my spreadsheets on paper so net win so far!