Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the best AI for spreadsheets. Anthropic positions it specifically for polished documents, slides and spreadsheets, and it is good at the whole job: writing formulas, explaining someone else's workbook, cleaning messy tables and turning a sheet into a summary someone can act on. At $2/$10 per million tokens it is affordable for daily use; GPT-6.1 Sol is an equally capable alternative for analysis-heavy workbooks.
The safest spreadsheets default, the cheaper option worth trying first, and the specialist pick — before you read the detail below.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the strongest answer here for spreadsheets — pick it when quality of output matters more than the $2.00/1M/1M input you pay for it.
Gemini 3.8 Flash handles the same job for about 63% less per token. Start here and only move up if the output is not good enough.
GPT-6.1 Sol is the fastest of these for spreadsheets — worth it when latency is what the reader notices, not the last few points of reasoning depth.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the best spreadsheet model for formulas, cleanup and explanations.
GPT-6.1 Sol is stronger when spreadsheet work becomes business or financial analysis.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is a fast, cheap option for simple formula help and table tidying.
Use Claude Sonnet 5.5 for formulas, table cleanup and understanding inherited workbooks.
Use GPT-6.1 Sol when the spreadsheet feeds a real decision and the logic is complex.
Use Gemini 3.8 Flash when price matters more than handling tricky edge cases.
Switch the scoring lens to see whether the spreadsheets answer changes when cost, speed, or long-document depth leads the decision.
Anthropic / Balanced / Oct 10, 2026
Near-Opus 5.5 quality on scoped work at half the price.
Ranks models by the broadest mix of coding, writing, research, and long-context usefulness.
The work is long, ambiguous and multi-step — Anthropic positions Opus 5.5 for exactly that — or you need the lowest possible price, where Haiku 5.5 costs a twentieth as much.
Where the spreadsheets recommendation shifts once you weigh price or latency differently.
Near-Opus 5.5 quality on scoped work at half the price.
Near-Astra capability at Sol pricing — OpenAI's value pick.
Google's fast agentic workhorse — strong coding at Flash pricing.
List prices and published scores — the numbers this page's pick is built from.
| Model | Input | Output | Est. month | Context | Speed | Coding | Writing | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic | $2.00/1M | $10.00/1M | $40 | 1M tokens | Fast | 98 | 98 | 95 |
| GPT-6.1 SolOpenAI | $2.00/1M | $10.00/1M | $40 | 1.1M tokens | Balanced | 98 | 94 | 97 |
| Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle | $0.75/1M | $3.75/1M | $15 | 1M tokens | Very fast | 92 | 86 | 89 |
Scores out of 100 — how we evaluate models. “Est. month” is 10M in / 2M out at list price: a ceiling, no discounts.
Why each one is on the shortlist for spreadsheets, what it is genuinely good at, and where we would steer you away from it.
Our pick for spreadsheets. It scores 98/100 on the coding axis we weight this page by, and nothing else in this shortlist matches it on output quality.
Anthropic's September 28, 2026 Sonnet — built for well-scoped everyday work like features, bug fixes, documents, slides and spreadsheets, priced at $2/$10 and close to Opus 5.5 on most of Anthropic's launch rows.
The work is long, ambiguous and multi-step — Anthropic positions Opus 5.5 for exactly that — or you need the lowest possible price, where Haiku 5.5 costs a twentieth as much.
The model most people should default to in the Claude lineup. Sonnet 5.5 lands within a few points of Opus 5.5 on most of Anthropic's launch rows, beats it on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and costs half as much. Step up to Opus 5.5 only when the task is open-ended and long.
Full pricing, benchmark table and release notes on the Claude Sonnet 5.5 page.
The fastest model in this shortlist for spreadsheets. Pick it when turnaround is what your readers or users notice.
OpenAI's September 29, 2026 DevDay release — a Sol-tier reasoning model that OpenAI says comes close to GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use and professional work at one fifth of Astra's price.
You need it inside ordinary ChatGPT chats today, or your prompts regularly pass 272K tokens where the rate doubles.
OpenAI's best value for serious work. GPT-6.1 Sol replaces both GPT-6 Sol and, for most teams, GPT-6 Astra: independent testing has it a point behind Astra at a fifth of the list price. Pick Astra only when the last point of capability is worth five times the bill.
Full pricing, benchmark table and release notes on the GPT-6.1 Sol page.
The value option for spreadsheets: about 63% less per token than Claude Sonnet 5.5, at 92/100 on coding. Worth starting here and moving up only if the output disappoints.
Google's fast agentic workhorse — strong coding at Flash pricing. Full Gemini 3.8 Flash review →
UseRightAI recommendations are based on practical decision factors people actually feel in day-to-day use.
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For spreadsheets, Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Anthropic) is our pick. Near-Opus 5.5 quality on scoped work at half the price. It costs $2/1M input and $10/1M output tokens, with a 1M-token context window — enough headroom for all but the largest spreadsheets jobs. GPT-6.1 Sol is the closest alternative if it doesn't fit your setup.
Because the work it is built for overlaps closely with spreadsheets: day-to-day feature and bug-fix work in an IDE or coding agent, where speed matters more than ceiling and drafting documents, slide decks and spreadsheets that need to be presentable on the first pass. The model most people should default to in the Claude lineup. Sonnet 5.5 lands within a few points of Opus 5.5 on most of Anthropic's launch rows, beats it on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and costs half as much. Step up to Opus 5.5 only when the task is open-ended and long.
On a moderate month — 10M input and 2M output tokens — Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs about $40.00 at list price, with no batch or caching discounts applied, so treat that as a ceiling. Gemini 3.8 Flash is the cheaper route at roughly $15.00 for the same volume, if spreadsheets is high-volume enough for price to lead the decision.
Anthropic itself says Opus 5.5 is better on loosely defined tasks that need longer reasoning. Trails Opus 5.5 on Humanity's Last Exam (64.5% vs 67.7%). Avoid it if the work is long, ambiguous and multi-step — Anthropic positions Opus 5.5 for exactly that — or you need the lowest possible price, where Haiku 5.5 costs a twentieth as much. None of that rules it out for spreadsheets on its own — but if one of those limits maps onto how you actually work, take the alternative on this page seriously rather than defaulting to the top pick.
Gemini 3.8 Flash at $0.75/1M input is the budget option here. Google's fast agentic workhorse — strong coding at Flash pricing. Expect a quality step down on the hardest cases — the usual pattern is to route routine spreadsheets volume to Gemini 3.8 Flash and keep Claude Sonnet 5.5 for the work where a wrong answer is expensive.
Gemini 3.8 Flash, rated very fast against Claude Sonnet 5.5's fast. Speed matters most for interactive and high-volume work; if your spreadsheets runs in the background, the slower and more capable model is usually the better trade.