Google Sheets → Excel

My Google-Sheets-only functions break in Excel

Formulas like GOOGLEFINANCE, GOOGLETRANSLATE, IMPORTRANGE or IMAGE work in Google Sheets but have no Excel equivalent. In Excel they error out — or, more quietly, sit there showing an old value that never updates.

What’s actually breaking

These are functions Google built into Sheets alone. Excel has never had them, so there is nothing to convert them to. Depending on how the file crosses over, a Sheets-only function shows up in Excel in one of three ways:

Live read, formula intact: the formula text comes across and Excel doesn’t recognise the name — you get a clear #NAME? error.
Cached error: the Sheet already showed an error for that cell, and that #NAME? is what carries over.
Frozen value: the export captured the last computed value as a plain number or string, and the formula is gone — so Excel shows a value that looks fine but will never recalculate.

How xlsx-for-ai handles it

Here we are deliberately precise about what we can and can’t promise today, because this class can fail silently and we won’t claim more than we’ve proven.

What xlsx-for-ai catches now: the two cases above where a tell survives into the file — a live formula whose name Excel can’t resolve, and a cached #NAME?. In both, our reader flags the cell as a Google-Sheets-only function that won’t work in Excel, so you don’t mistake it for a real value.

What it does not catch yet: the frozen-value case. When an export has already replaced the formula with its last result, there is often no signature left in the file to distinguish it from a number someone typed. We do not currently detect that case, and we’d rather say so than imply full coverage.

So the honest claim is narrow and true: we catch Sheets-only functions that still carry a tell, and we’re open that a value frozen at export can slip through. If a converted number matters and the original cell used a Google-only function, check it against the live Sheet.

How to check your file

Add the connector to Claude once — open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector and paste https://api.xlsx-for-ai.dev/mcp/claude. Full steps are on the developers page.
Read the live Sheet by id. In Claude, ask:
```
Read this Google Sheet and convert it to an .xlsx, with xfa.
Flag anything that won't survive the conversion:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/YOUR_SHEET_ID/edit
```
Reading a live Sheet is read-only and uses a read-only Google token you supply — see the developers page for the one-time setup.
Or skip the token — in Google Sheets choose File → Download → Microsoft Excel (.xlsx), then ask Claude to “read this file with xfa and tell me what it flagged.” Same reader, same flags.
Read the flags. The result tells you exactly what it did and what it couldn’t carry across — so you review a short list instead of hunting for a wrong number later.

Safest path: for cells that used GOOGLEFINANCE, IMPORTRANGE and friends, read the live Sheet by id (not a stale download) so the formula — and its flag — is still present for xfa to catch.

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