With In Parallel connected to Claude, a single chat can refresh an entire Excel project plan against reality — revise statuses and due dates, add new workstreams, mark shipped and cancelled work, refresh the goals and risks, and log every change to a Changelog sheet — all while keeping In Parallel as the source of truth and your original baseline untouched.

In Parallel holds the execution layer: what actually happened, captured as decisions, drift, goals, and accountable actions. Excel holds the plan artifact your stakeholders read. This flow reconciles reality into the artifact — Claude reads In Parallel and rewrites the spreadsheet; it does not change your In Parallel data.

First time? Set the pairing up once first — see Set up the In Parallel + Excel project workflow in Claude. This guide assumes the Project, connector, instructions, and your .xlsx are already in place.

The flow is always the same:

The rest of this guide expands each step.

Open a chat in your Project and ask in plain language. Name the file and its sheets, the In Parallel Workspace (and any sub-projects), and what you want done — for example:

"I manage my Growth Project plan in Growth Project Plan – Baseline.xlsx (sheets: Project Plan, Goals, Risks). It's a baseline from early April and is out of date. The source of truth is the In Parallel 'Growth Projects' Workspace and its Back-to-School and Holiday Peak sub-projects. Pull the latest — execution plan, drift report, goals, action items, decisions — reconcile, and update the file: revise statuses and due dates, add new workstreams, mark completed/cancelled items, and refresh goals and risks. Add a Changelog sheet listing every change (old → new and the In Parallel source). Keep the baseline intact — save the result as a new file. Ask me any clarifying questions before you start."

That last sentence matters: asking for clarifying questions up front settles scope before anything is written.

Reconciling is a judgement call, so the assistant checks how you want changes represented before it writes anything. Typical questions:

Pick the options that match how your stakeholders read the file. This is the human-in-the-loop step — nothing is written until you answer.

Once you've answered, the assistant reads your Workspace — execution plan, drift report, goals, decisions, action items, open questions, and escalations — across the program and each sub-project, reconciles it against your sheets, then writes the updated workbook.

The first time it uses each In Parallel read you'll be asked to allow it. Approve the reads for the first few runs, and switch to Always allow only once you're confident the workflow is behaving as expected.

The reads are one-way: the assistant reads In Parallel and writes Excel. Your execution layer stays the source of truth — keep editing reality in In Parallel itself, and let the spreadsheet follow.

When it's done, the assistant summarises what changed sheet by sheet and saves the result as a new file, leaving your baseline untouched. Skim the summary before moving on — it's your confirmation that the file now reflects In Parallel.

Open the new file. Your original sheets keep their exact formatting; changed cells carry the marking you chose (for example an orange border and a hover note with old → new and the In Parallel source). New sub-projects appear as their own sheets, the goals and risks are refreshed, and a Changelog sheet lists every change with its source.

This is what makes the refresh trustworthy: each changed cell's note and each Changelog row name the In Parallel record behind the change — a decision, a drift signal, a linked delivery ticket. Anyone reading the file can see why a cell moved, rather than the plan appearing to change on its own.

Because the assistant read In Parallel's drift report while reconciling, it can flag execution risk a static spreadsheet wouldn't show — an overdue task, a decision that's sat unresolved for weeks and is blocking work downstream, the program tracking at risk. Treat these as prompts to act in In Parallel (confirm the decision, reassign the action), not just cells to recolour.

The result is saved as a new, dated file, so your baseline stays intact and the Changelog gives you a full audit trail of how the plan evolved.

To keep the file current without re-asking, have the assistant schedule a recurring refresh — for example a weekly sync that re-pulls In Parallel and regenerates the workbook. In Claude Desktop this becomes a scheduled task you can see, run on demand, or turn off.

Note: Claude Desktop scheduled tasks only run while the desktop app is open. If the app is closed at the scheduled time, the run happens the next time you open it. Run it manually once after creating it to confirm it behaves the way you expect.