Depending on the type of writing you do, you may like the syntax feature. I use it review the quality of my writing. I end up with tighter prose as a result.
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May I ask: Do you have Claude Pro or Max?
I would like to acchieve something in that direction with Claude Cowork. I’m a teacher for German as a Second Language. I teach kids between 6 and 15 years old.
Our school system is still in the stone age and strict about learning plans, weekly plans, monthly plans,… most of my colleagues do it on paper. I started to write stuff on my Macbook. I have a kids advancements and learn status in my Obsidian vault. Usually I write a note in during lessons, when stuff happens. And then after the lessons I copy pasta them into the demanded excel sheets.
I want Claude to take the infos out of the text files and put it into the Excel files. I’m curious if this will work. This would save me like hours per week.
I’m using Claude Max, but I suspect Pro will be able to do the same. Instead of making a guess, I asked Claude. 
According to Claude,
Claude Pro can handle this task well. The workflow they are describing involves reading text files (notes from Obsidian, which are just Markdown/plain text), extracting structured information (student progress, learning milestones, behavioral notes), and populating Excel spreadsheets accordingly. This is well within what Claude can do in a standard Pro conversation with file creation enabled.
The practical workflow would look something like this: they upload their text notes and their Excel template (or an existing spreadsheet), ask Claude to extract the relevant information from the notes and place it into the correct cells or rows in the spreadsheet, and Claude produces an updated Excel file they can download. This could realistically save them the hours of manual copy-and-paste they are describing.
A few practical notes worth passing along. First, Claude works best when the Excel template has a clear structure, so column headers for student name, date, observation category, and so forth will help Claude place information accurately. Second, if their Obsidian notes follow even a loose consistent pattern (such as starting each entry with a student name or date), the extraction will be more reliable. Third, they can do this iteratively, uploading a batch of notes weekly and getting back a populated spreadsheet each time.
Regarding Cowork specifically, that is currently a beta product designed for automating file and task management on the desktop, which could potentially streamline this even further by working directly with local files. But the core task of reading text and filling Excel files does not require Cowork or Max. Standard Claude Pro with file creation is sufficient.
The main limitation to be aware of is conversation length. If they are processing a very large volume of notes and spreadsheets in a single session, they may hit message limits on Pro. But for a weekly batch of classroom notes going into a few spreadsheets, Pro should handle it comfortably.
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For something like this, you really don’t need to pay an eye-watering amount (Claude Max) to do it. In O365, you could use Power Query. In the Mac realm, AppleScript, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro etc. In Google Workspace, Apps Script.
As I see it, you can either ask an LLM on how to do something with your available tools. Or, just ask it to do the activity itself. The latter usually comes with a significant cost. If you are OK with that, then fine. But what I would highlight is, that for some scenarios, there is no real need to subcontract the work to an LLM, when non-AI workflows may suffice.
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I’ve gone both the “just do it for me” and “build me a tool” route, and which you choose depends on your familiarity with alternative tools (like Power Query), the time and effort you’re willing to devote towards learning the tools (Claude and Gemini will both teach you), and whether the data you’re working with is really amenable to automation or the already existing range of available tools.
I’m on the Pro plan. I’ve had great success turning Claude Cowork loose on structured financial data—e.g., account statements, GAAP financial statements, big data sets—in both PDF and CSV formats and asking for an Excel workbook. My prompts are very detailed: I tell Claude exactly what data I want and how to format it. I’ve also had success pointing Claude or Gemini at a web page and asking it to extract data and put it in a CSV file. In these cases, I’m not asking Claude to analyze the data it extracts for me, nor am just pointing at the data and asking it what it thinks.
Were I in your position, here’s what I’d do: I’d work with Claude itself to develop the best solution for your particular situation. Tell Claude what you need to do, what the end result should be, what your data source is, and how often you need to do it. Let it see both your Obsidian notes and the spread sheet you need to complete. Claude is very good at helping you build a workflow that meets your needs and works within your token budget.
Here’s a personal example: I often need to search art museum websites for information about a particular work of art, including an image. Every minute I spend typing into a search box is a minute I can’t spend doing what I want to do, which is to analyze and think about the works in question. I asked Claude if there were some way I could use it as part of the process. Claude made it quite clear that asking it to do a web search was neither efficient nor cost-effective. Instead, it’s helping me build a little tool that will plug into the Museums’ own publicly-available APIs or data sets to get the result. I had imagined that I’d use the query tool one museum at a time, but Claude suggested making a tool that could search multiple institutions at once. Since Claude is only helping me build the tool rather than doing the work itself, I don’t need to worry about having enough token headroom to perform the search.
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Thank you kindly for your input. I’m just fiddling around with Claude right now. I tried to build a small API tool for an online game I’m playing from time to time and Claude did an excellent job. I never thought about this… I guess I’m still thinking too much inside of the box. I will definitively try everything all of you suggested.