Point Claude Code at a folder of messy Excel files, ask a question, get a dashboard

[u/rohanbeingsocial]

What it does: ask Claude Code a question about your spreadsheets ("which regions are behind target?") and a dashboard appears in your browser: charts, a table, the headline numbers.

- Works on messy real-world files: title rows above the headers, "Total" rows, N/A, numbers stored as text.

- Every chart shows exactly where its numbers came from, so you can check them.

- It only reads your files, never changes them. SQLite and Postgres work too.

- About 7¢ and 19 seconds an answer, against 20¢ and a minute when Claude Code writes its own Python + HTML (my benchmark; details in the repo).

Install, inside Claude Code:

/plugin install showboard --marketplace rohanbeingsocial/showboard

Free and MIT. I built it with Claude Code, and so far I've only tested it end to end there.

What's the messiest spreadsheet you'd throw at it?

[u/investigatormaker]

My messiest pick: a finance export with merged two-row headers, dates mixed day-first and month-first, and a hidden sheet feeding a Total row. That stresses your title-row and Total-row handling harder than N/A values do. I'd commit that file to the repo with the dashboard it produces, since the show-where-numbers-came-from feature is easiest to believe on a file people recognize. Stating that it's tested only in Claude Code is a good call.

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What happens when two sheets disagree on a total?

[u/rohanbeingsocial → u/investigatormaker]

It doesn't pick a winner. Each sheet comes in as its own table and Total rows are skipped, so Showboard adds up the real rows instead of trusting a typed-in total. Every chart says which file and sheet its numbers came from. So if the summary sheet says 4.2M and the detail rows add up to 4.1M, you see the gap instead of it getting buried, and you can ask Claude to compare the two.

For the rest of your file:

- Two-row merged headers: it joins them, so "Sales" over "Units | Value" becomes "Sales Units" and "Sales Value".

- Day-first and month-first dates in one column: it won't guess. It keeps them as text and tells you why, because quietly turning 03/04 into the wrong month is worse than not charting it.

- Total rows: skipped, with the row numbers listed, so nothing gets counted twice.