Overview
Research takes time. Analysis takes focus. Organizing data takes patience. What if you had an AI assistant that could help you do all three - faster, smarter, and with less effort? In this practical, hands-on webinar, you'll discover how Claude, Anthropic's powerful AI assistant, can transform the way you research topics, analyze information, and organize data for your business or career.
You'll learn how to use both the Claude website and the brand-new Claude add-in for Excel to gather and summarize research, evaluate sources, clean messy data, spot trends, build categorizations, and turn raw information into clear, actionable insights. We'll walk through real-world business examples including competitive research, market analysis, customer data, financial reports, survey results, and operational spreadsheets.
Whether you're a business owner, analyst, manager, consultant, or administrative professional, you'll leave this session with practical techniques, ready-to-use prompts, and proven workflows that let Claude do the heavy lifting - so you can focus on the decisions that grow your business.
Areas Covered in the Session
- Quick tour of the Claude.ai interface and why it excels at research and analysis
- Understanding what Claude can (and can't) do with research and data
- Pasting content vs. uploading files (CSV, Excel, PDF, Word, text)
- Using Claude's built-in web search for current information
- Using Projects to keep ongoing research organized
- Researching topics, industries, companies, and competitors
- Summarizing long articles, reports, and PDFs in seconds
- Comparing multiple sources side-by-side
- Asking follow-up questions to dig deeper
- Fact-checking and evaluating source reliability
- Building research briefs, executive summaries, and reading lists
- Using Claude's Research mode for deeper, multi-source investigations
- Standardizing inconsistent entries (names, addresses, phone numbers, dates)
- Removing duplicates and identifying data quality issues
- Splitting, combining, and reformatting columns
- Categorizing and tagging free-text data (survey responses, feedback, support tickets)
- Turning unstructured text into structured tables
- Summarizing large datasets in plain English
- Spotting trends, outliers, and patterns
- Comparing time periods (month-over-month, year-over-year)
- Asking Claude to "interview" your data with follow-up questions
- Generating charts, tables, and visualizations using Claude's Artifacts feature
- Installing and setting up Claude for Excel
- Navigating the Claude sidebar inside Excel
- Asking Claude questions about your active spreadsheet
- Generating formulas (VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, SUMIFS, and more) with plain English
- Cleaning and transforming data directly in your worksheet
- Creating new columns with AI-generated categorizations and summaries
- Building pivot tables and analysis with Claude's guidance
Who Will Benefit
- Business owners
- CEO's / CFO's / CTO's
- Managers of all levels
- Anybody who uses Excel, PowerPoint, Word, or Outlook on a regular basis, and wants to be more efficient and productive
- Administrators
- Salespeople
- Trainers
- Bankers
- Self Employed
- HR
- Project Managers
- Office workers
Speaker Profile
Tom Fragale is a computer professional with over 40 years of professional experience. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and a Microsoft Certified Expert in Excel. He has trained over 45,000 businesspeople in on-line webinars, public seminars, and on-site training sessions. His clients include many Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, military bases, and companies large and small across many industries, including manufacturing, banking, pharmaceutical, education, retail, etc. He started his career as a database application programmer and has served as a consultant and a trainer on many successful projects. His topics of expertise include: Access, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Crystal Reports, SQL Server, Visio, ChatGPT, PowerBi, and CoPilot, among others. His passion is training people and helping people get the most out of their computers, and he is a published author having written a book on Microsoft Access and another book on Excel Pivot Tables. He graduated in 1988 from LaSalle University in Philadelphia, PA with a BA in Computer Science.