AI makes Excel faster. It doesn't make Excel governed.

Let's be fair about what these tools do well. They write formulas. They untangle someone else's workbook. They clean data and build model scaffolding fast, and that is real time back in your week.

What they don't do is fix the reason the workbook was wrong in the first place.

That's the disease. AI makes Excel work faster; it doesn't make Excel data governed. Most planners live in Excel. Most of the data they need lives somewhere Excel can't reach. Speeding up the copy-paste doesn't close that gap, it just gets you to the wrong number sooner.

So I closed it

I built an assortment unit plan in Claude Code that uses Excel as the working plan and connects straight to the database. Real live data, full history, no exports, no stale pulls.

• Size scales and curves build in the sheet and write back to the database.
• Committed placeholder buys generate and append straight to the on-order table — the purchase order table, for the non-database folk.
• Assortment choice count and tops-down reconciliation right out of the gate.
• New choices get a code the moment you type the description.

See it running

This is the plan being built end to end, on live data, in the tool a planner already knows how to open.

There are more walkthroughs — the data layer underneath it, size curves, the forecast tooling — over on the demos page.

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