Claude now works inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

Anthropic has put Claude inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. The Claude for Google Workspace add-on, which entered public beta on 6 October, opens a sidebar next to whatever file you’re working on and can read it, take instructions and edit it in place. It’s available on every paid Claude plan: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Free accounts don’t get it.

Alongside the add-on, the company is releasing beta Google Docs, Sheets and Slides connectors that work in the opposite direction, letting Claude create and edit Google files from inside a normal Claude chat. It follows last month’s launch of Claude’s own Docs and Slides editors, which kept that work inside Claude rather than Google’s apps.

What the sidebar does

The add-on sees the document, spreadsheet or deck you have open, plus anything you’ve selected, so you can point it at a paragraph, a range of cells or a single slide. In Docs, Claude can fix a line or restyle a heading without disturbing the formatting around it, and for larger rewrites it can offer suggestion cards that you apply or dismiss one by one.

Sheets gets the most muscle. Claude can write and repair formulas, build pivot tables and native charts, and add tabs. For joins and data cleaning, Anthropic says it can pull a range into Python and write the results back. In Slides, it builds new slides from the deck’s existing layouts and themes, then checks for elements that overlap, run off the slide or are hard to read.

When you’re signed in, the sidebar offers the same models, connectors and skills as your Claude account, so a deck can pull in data from a service your organisation has already connected. Enterprise controls including the Compliance API, customer-managed encryption keys and OpenTelemetry audit export also apply to the add-on.

How much it can change on its own

By default, the add-on runs in “Ask before edits” mode, showing a summary of each change and waiting for approval. Switch to “Accept all edits” and it works through a task without stopping, although, according to Anthropic’s setup guide, it still pauses before adding links, inserting images from web addresses or removing anyone’s access. Claude can’t share a file, change its owner, or create menus or scheduled automations, even if asked.

Every edit is recorded under your name in Google’s version history, so undoing Claude’s work is the same as undoing your own. The sidebar reads only the open file and any connectors you’ve switched on, not the rest of your Drive, email or calendar. You can attach up to 20 reference files per message (30MB per document, 10MB per image), and web search is off by default. Chat history is saved per file in your browser and doesn’t sync across devices.

Can you turn it on here?

Claude.ai is officially offered in the UAE, according to Anthropic’s supported countries list, and the launch announcement doesn’t mention any regional exclusions. In practice, the bigger hurdle for most office users will be their Google Workspace admin rather than their location.

The add-on is installed from the Google Workspace Marketplace. Once installed, it appears under Extensions > Claude > Open Claude in all three apps; one install covers Docs, Sheets and Slides. Many organisations block Marketplace apps by default, in which case the install button is greyed out or Google shows “This application is not allowed by your administrator.” Only a Workspace admin can fix that, either by adding Claude to the allowlist or by having a super admin install it for the whole domain or for selected groups. Admin installs work even while user installs are blocked.

The connectors need separate setup. On Team and Enterprise plans, an owner or primary owner has to enable them first. The side-by-side editing pane works on Claude on the web in Chrome and in Claude Desktop with its built-in browser turned on, which is off by default on Enterprise plans.

This puts Claude in direct competition with Gemini, which Google already builds into its own apps and keeps expanding with features such as Notebooks for Workspace accounts. For companies that already pay for Claude, the sidebar saves copying content back and forth. Because it’s still in beta, though, some features may change before a full release.

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