Claude can now be opened in a sidebar next to a Google Doc, Sheet or Slides deck. It reads the file, sees the text, cells or slides you have selected, and changes the file itself. It is in beta on every paid Claude plan, and no separate price has been announced for it.
What is actually new
Google's own assistant, Gemini, has had a side panel in these apps since 2024. Claude already worked inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and it could already read Google Drive files through a connector. What is new is Claude editing live inside Google's apps, and the reverse direction too: you can start in a Claude chat, paste a link to a Google file or ask for a new one, and the file opens beside the conversation.
The same assistant, in whichever suite you use
The sidebar brings along the models, connectors and saved skills you already use in Claude. A skill is a set of instructions you save once and reuse.
Here is an example from a different kind of work. A finance manager at a hospital group gets actuals from eight departments every month. She opens an empty sheet, attaches the source files and asks for budget against actuals, with a tab for each department and a summary chart. Claude writes the formulas, adds the tabs, builds the chart and flags every department that is over budget. By hand that is half a day of work. With Claude it is a review of under an hour, and it comes out as a normal Google Sheet her colleagues can open.
Then she saves the steps as a skill. Next month, whoever is covering for her runs the same steps and gets the same report.
What this changes
Until now, the easiest AI to use on a document was the one built into the software that held it. That made the office suite a quiet way of choosing your assistant for you. When any assistant can work inside any suite, the choice moves to which one knows your company's way of working best: your report formats, your review steps, your customer history in Salesforce. Those live in the assistant's saved skills and connectors, not in the suite. A company that spends a few weeks writing them down will find them worth more than the suite licence it was loyal to.
Expect the next round of competition to be about those saved procedures. A mixed office, where one team lives in Google and another in Microsoft, can finally use one assistant with one set of company habits across both.
You stay the reviewer
By default Claude asks before each edit, showing a card that says what it will change, and waits for you to approve. An "Accept all edits" mode lets it work through a whole task without stopping. A sensible way to use the two is to approve every step while a new task is still being proven, then switch to accept-all on a copy of the file once the output has been right a few times.
Claude's access matches your existing Google sharing permissions, so it can see whatever you can see. If your shared drive still holds old folders that everyone in the company can open, the assistant will read them too and may pull from them. Tidying who can see what is the one job to do before a team starts using it.