Introducing the Excel Skill

Create Excel without opening in Excel

AuthorAuthor

Samuel ROY & Olivier Legris
March 13, 2026

Hey everyone,

What if you could create professional Excel files, dashboards, and analysis, without ever opening Microsoft Excel?

Meet Excel Skills

We embedded Excel directly into Alter.

Drop your files (PDFs, CSVs, bank statements, whatever).

Ask for what you need. Alter handles the rest.

Real examples:

  1. Personal Finance Hub
    Add bank statements → Ask for a dashboard → Get categorized spending, trends, and insights—all in Excel

  2. Investment Research
    Upload financial PDFs → Extract data → Create multi-tab dashboards with overviews, growth analysis, and investment summaries

  3. Business Analytics
    Feed raw data → Define calculations → Automate monthly reporting in Excel format

How It Works

  1. Create a workspace with your data

  2. Add the Xlsx Skill

  3. Ask: "Create a dashboard" or "Extract and analyze this data"

  4. Alter builds the Excel file with formulas, charts, and structure intact

  5. Download and use it anywhere

No Excel expertise needed. No manual data entry. No complex formulas to write.

What You Get

  • Automated dashboards with proper formatting

  • Multi-tab Excel files with linked data

  • Real-time calculations and summaries

  • Professional-grade financial analysis

  • Files you can share, edit, or build on

Use Cases

Finance teams — Auto-generate FX reports, budget tracking, cash flow analysis

Researchers — Extract data from PDFs into structured Excel analysis

Investors — Build investment thesis dashboards from company filings

Creators — Turn raw metrics into professional financial reports

The Real Power

Pair Excel Skills with Workspaces.

Example of prompt used where bank statement are stored: 

Create an Excel personal finance dashboard from scratch using the transaction data in the Data folder (feb.csv, march.csv, april.csv).

Requirements:
* Currency: pounds (£)
* Raw data sheet: Import all transactions with all columns
* Dashboard sheet with:
* Key metrics: total income, expenses, net savings, savings rate
* Monthly summary table by category (Feb-Apr)
* Category breakdown with percentages
* Visual charts (pie expense distribution, line trend)
* Category analysis sheet: monthly breakdown with averages and trends
* Professional formatting, color-coding, and currency formatting
* Save as dashboard.xlsx in the Personal Finance folder root

What Excel use case should we solve?

Let us know how you use Excel, and what workflow should we built around!

Olivier & Samuel

Full Changelog

New Features & Enhancements

  • Excel Skill: Alter can now turn source documents and raw data into Excel files, dashboards, and analysis through a simple chat workflow.

  • Voice Processing: Updated Argmax to latest version.

Bug Fixes & Stability

  • Transcript Recovery: Reworked transcripts to be recoverable and reindexable.

  • Recording Reliability: Fixed first-recording startup issues, improved recovery from screen recording interruption, and fail fast when Whisper models cannot load.

  • Audio & Dictation: Fixed voice processor selection issues, better error handling when loading transcription mdoels, enabled cloud dictation on the trial plan, and resolved dictation stop/copy-paste race conditions.

  • Chat & Editor UX: Fixed long tool-call URL overflow in chat, preserved new lines when copying code blocks, and restored the missing YouTube transcript icon in the context strip.

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