On October 6, Anthropic put a Google Workspace add-on into public beta. Claude sits in a sidebar next to your open file in Docs, Sheets or Slides, reads it, sees what you have selected, and edits it in place. It is available on every paid Claude plan.
Three new connectors arrive with it, also in beta, and they run the other direction: you start in the chat, paste a Google link or ask for a new document, and Claude creates the file in your Drive.
What is different in each of the three apps
In Docs, Claude can fix a sentence or restyle a heading without touching the formatting around it. For bigger rewrites it proposes instead: each card in the sidebar highlights the passage it would change, and you apply it or dismiss it.
In Sheets, Claude writes formulas, builds pivot tables and native Sheets charts, and adds new tabs. For joins and data cleaning it pulls a range into Python and writes the result back into the sheet.
In Slides, Claude builds new slides from the deck’s own layouts and theme so they match the rest. Then it reviews its own work and flags elements that overlap or run off the slide, plus text that is hard to read.
Two modes, and the default one asks
The default is «Ask before edits»: every change shows up as an approval card with a summary, and Claude waits. In «Accept all edits» it works through the task and writes without stopping.
Sign in with your Claude account and the sidebar carries the same models, connectors and skills you use in Claude itself. Anthropic’s example is a QBR deck for a customer, where Claude pulls account history from Salesforce and recent call notes through the Google Drive connector. Save that QBR format as a skill and your team builds the next deck through the same steps.
On Enterprise plans the familiar controls cover the add-on too: Compliance API, customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), and OpenTelemetry audit export.
Installing goes through the Workspace Marketplace
The add-on comes from the Google Workspace Marketplace; after that you find it inside a file under Extensions > Claude > Open Claude. Admins can push it to a whole domain or to selected groups from the Google Admin console.
For the other direction — editing Google files from inside Claude — you turn on the Docs, Sheets and Slides connectors. On Team and Enterprise plans an owner or primary owner has to do that first. Claude’s access matches your existing Google sharing permissions; it sees nothing more than you do.
The second desk Claude now sits at
Anthropic has done this in Microsoft’s suite already — Excel with Agent Mode has been running for months, and Docs and Slides in Anthropic’s own apps shipped in September. The direction is the interesting part. Claude isn’t pulling people into its own interface; it’s going to where their files already sit.
For teams on Google Workspace that removes the detour every spreadsheet has taken until now: download, upload to Claude, copy the result back. What stays open: beta is beta, and the self-check in Slides sounds like a feature you can only judge after twenty decks.