Picture this. It’s 11pm, the investor deck is due in the morning, and one number in the forecast just changed. Now every chart on slides four through nine is wrong, and you’re rebuilding them by hand for the third time this week.
If that scene feels a little too familiar, you’re going to like what this LinkedIn creator shared. He’s a founder who sold his last company, swore he’d never do the midnight deck grind again, and then launched an AI startup where he’s still in Excel and PowerPoint every single day. The difference now? He doesn’t touch the manual part anymore.
The grind nobody questioned
The original poster used to build every investor deck himself. Every forecast, every slide, every last-minute chart at 11pm. He thought that was just the job. And honestly, most founders still think that way. They build models by hand, format decks at midnight, and clean data nobody has time to clean properly.
What stuck with me from his post is this: most of that work is repeatable, most of it is slow, and none of it needed to be done by a human this whole time.
The turning point
What changed things for him was Claude working directly inside Excel and PowerPoint through Microsoft add-ins. He’s clear that this isn’t a copy-paste tool. It edits the actual file you already have open. It reads your model, understands how the cells connect, and explains why a number moved.
That last part is the real shift. Instead of asking a chatbot for a formula and pasting it back in, the AI sits inside your workbook with full context of how everything connects.
What it’s doing for his team right now
The author listed exactly what he and his team hand off today. On the Excel side:
- Finds the 5 most important insights in a messy workbook
- Builds a 3-year forecast straight from historical data
- Debugs every #REF and #VALUE error in seconds, then explains the fix
- Builds a pivot table summarising revenue by region and product
- Explains exactly why gross margin dropped, cell by cell
- Remembers standing rules, like never overwriting a formula without asking
And on the PowerPoint side:
- Builds a 10-slide deck from a single prompt
- Turns 6 messy bullet points into a clean process diagram
- Rewrites every slide title into an insight-driven headline
- Matches your existing template, fonts, and brand colours automatically
- Pulls numbers straight from your model into your investor deck
- Carries context across both files, so nothing gets copied and pasted twice
The one that made me sit up: he’s had it turn a full workbook into a five-slide executive summary in one prompt. That used to take him and an analyst most of an afternoon. One prompt versus an afternoon of two people’s time. That’s not a small productivity bump, that’s a different job description.
Why this matters
Most people still think of Claude as a chat window. The founders who get ahead this year are the ones treating it like the analyst and the designer they haven’t hired yet. Everyone else is still copy-pasting between two open tabs.
I think the expert nailed the real divide here. It’s not about who has access to AI, because everyone does. It’s about whether you’re still treating it as a separate window you visit, or as a coworker sitting inside the files you already live in.
How to try this yourself
If you want to test the same workflow the post’s author described, start small:
- Install the Claude add-in for Excel or PowerPoint from Microsoft’s add-in store
- Open a workbook you already know well, so you can judge the answers
- Ask it to find the biggest errors or the five most important insights first
- Set a standing rule up front, like “Never overwrite a formula without asking me”
- Once you trust it in Excel, ask it to turn that model into a short executive summary deck
A good first prompt to test the cell-by-cell explanation feature: “Explain why gross margin dropped between Q1 and Q2, and show me which cells drove the change.”
The founder’s own suggestion is worth passing along too: send this to the founder who’s still up at midnight formatting a deck by hand. They’ll thank you.
Check out the full LinkedIn post for his complete breakdown, and let me know: what’s the one task in Excel or PowerPoint you’d hand off first?