⚡ AI for Productivity

Fabian's take — "Anthropic built a native plugin for Excel, allowing the Claude models to interact on code level with your worksheet. This allows you to use Claude as your highly proficient assistant for any spreadsheet task. Only downside I've seen so far: it costs a lot of tokens and uses up the limit of the lower-tier subscriptions quickly."

Fabian's take — "Cowork is how I think most knowledge work will happen within a year or two. Give it a folder of messy notes, come back to a structured report. Hand it expense screenshots, get a spreadsheet. Since January it's available on Pro — you no longer need the $100+ Max plan. Still in research preview, but already good enough for real work if you're clear about what you want."

Fabian's take — "Anthropic built a native plugin for PowerPoint, allowing the Claude models to interact on code level with your presentation. This allows you to use Claude as your highly proficient assistant for any presentation task. Only downside I've seen so far: it costs a lot of tokens and uses up the limit of the lower-tier subscriptions quickly."

Fabian's take — "n8n is the backbone of our automation stack. We generate hundreds of contracts and invoices per week through it, each in about 45 seconds. The self-hosted model means we pay nothing per execution, which matters when you're processing thousands of automations monthly. If your team has even a little technical ability, n8n beats Zapier and Make on both cost and flexibility."

Fabian's take — "NotebookLM's Audio Overview feature genuinely blew me away. Upload your research, and it generates a natural-sounding podcast discussion about your content. It's an incredible tool for processing and internalizing complex information."

Fabian's take — "If you've never used workflow automation before, start here — not with n8n. Zapier removes every barrier: nothing to install, nothing to host, and the AI-assisted builder means you can describe what you want and have a working automation in ten minutes. I've used it to summarize customer chatbot conversations, score them, push results to a database, and ping our company chat — all in one Zap. At low-to-moderate volume, you'll never hit the pricing ceiling. Once you outgrow it, you'll know exactly what you need from something more powerful."