Working with AI

Where to with AI in your daily work?

Where are you going in this bright new world of AI? If you’re like most business users, you’re probably trying to work out which tools you need, which subscriptions to pay for, and how to piece together a workflow that actually gets things done.

What if I told you there’s a simpler way? What if instead of juggling multiple applications, learning different interfaces, and managing various file formats, you could work from a single platform that handles everything?

Do you need some help at work? (Photo by Gerard Siderius on Unsplash)

The new work surface

Claude Code was developed by Anthropic - a major AI vendor - as an internal coding tool, utilising their Claude model. It runs from Powershell or the Mac Terminal (don’t let that frighten you, it’s simple and powerful). Once teams inside Anthropic got wind of Claude Code everyone wanted it. Now it is the single tool which most teams in Anthropic use all day, every day. Finance team? Tick! Legal team? Tick! And that’s just the beginning…

Claude Code isn’t just another AI chatbot. It’s becoming the work surface for the modern business user. Think about what you actually do in your work day: you write documents, analyse data, create presentations, manage projects, and collaborate with others. Claude Code can handle all of these tasks, and it does so using a common language that ties everything together.

That common language is Markdown.

Markdown as the lingua franca

Markdown has quietly become the universal format for text that needs to be both human-readable and machine-processable. Created by John Gruber in 2004¹, it’s now everywhere: GitHub, documentation systems, blogs, note-taking apps, and increasingly, business documents.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Markdown isn’t just a destination format. Claude Code knows how to use tools like Pandoc² and Quarto³ behind the scenes, so you don’t have to. Markdown becomes a universal translator that works invisibly for you. Write once in Markdown, and you can export to Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, HTML websites, or even LaTeX academic papers.

In Claude Code, everything you create can start in Markdown. Your meeting notes, project plans, reports, and presentations. When you need to share with colleagues who expect a Word document, no problem - Claude Code converts it using Pandoc. Need a PDF for printing? Done. Want to create slides for a presentation? Claude Code uses Quarto to turn the same Markdown content into a slideshow.

The beauty is that Claude Code also knows how to use a whole raft of Unix-style utilities - grep, sed, awk, jq, curl, and dozens of others - to manipulate data, process files, and automate tasks. You don’t need to learn command-line syntax or remember obscure parameters. Just ask for what you want in plain English, and Claude Code handles the technical implementation.

No more worrying about which version of Word you’re using, whether everyone can open your files, or losing formatting when you copy and paste between applications. Write once, export to whatever format your audience needs, with all the heavy lifting happening invisibly.

Beyond the Microsoft Office era

We’ve spent decades learning different applications for different tasks. Word for documents, Excel for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for presentations, Outlook for email, Project for project management, Visio for diagrams. Each with its own quirks, file formats, and learning curve.

This approach made sense when computers were limited and specialised tools were necessary. But AI changes the game fundamentally. When you can describe what you want in plain English and have it created for you, the complexity of multiple applications becomes unnecessary overhead.

What can you actually do?

In Claude Code, you can:

• Write and format documents in Markdown that export to PDF, Word, or HTML via Pandoc
• Analyse data from spreadsheets, databases, or CSV files
  
• Create visualisations and charts from your data
• Generate presentations with proper slide layouts using Quarto reveal.js
• Manage projects with task lists, timelines, and status tracking
• Build simple websites or documentation sites with Quarto
• Process and summarise large documents or datasets
• Create forms and surveys that collect and analyse responses
• Import existing Word documents and convert them to Markdown for editing

All of this happens in one interface, using natural language commands, with Markdown as the underlying format and powerful conversion tools that handle the heavy lifting of format translation.

The connection layer: MCPs

But what about connecting to your existing systems? This is where Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers come in. Think of them as universal connectors that let Claude Code talk to virtually any system you use.

Need to pull data from your customer database? There’s an MCP for that. Want to send messages through Slack or Teams? MCP handles it. Working with cloud storage, project management tools, CRM systems, or even Excel spreadsheets? MCPs create the bridge.

The beauty is that these connections are transparent to you. You ask for customer data in plain English, and Claude Code fetches it via the appropriate MCP, formats it in Markdown, and you can immediately work with it - whether that’s creating a report, generating charts, or building a presentation.

The practical advantages

This approach offers real benefits for business users:

Consistency: Everything looks and feels the same because it’s all Markdown-based. Quarto’s _brand.yml file⁴ enforces brand consistency across everything you produce, whilst reducing the need for designer-style work on every document.

Portability: Your files aren’t locked into proprietary formats. Markdown works everywhere.

Simplicity: One tool to learn instead of many. One subscription instead of multiple licenses.

Collaboration: Share raw Markdown files, rendered documents, or live links. Everyone can contribute regardless of their software setup.

Future-proofing: Markdown files from 2004 still work perfectly today. Can you say the same about Word documents from 2004?

What about Excel?

The Excel question comes up constantly. How do you get that deterministic, row-and-column output that finance teams and analysts depend on?

Claude Code handles this in multiple ways. With an Excel MCP, you can read from and write to existing Excel files directly. For new analyses, Claude Code can generate Python scripts or R code within Quarto documents that produce structured output, create Markdown tables for documentation, and export results to Excel format when needed. DuckDB serves as the Swiss Army knife for reading, writing, and creating complex analytical files using repeatable SQL - all written by Claude Code.

But here’s the key advantage: your data processing becomes documented and repeatable through custom slash commands. Instead of clicking through Excel menus and hoping you remember the steps next month, you write slash commands that encapsulate your entire analysis. Type /monthly-sales-report and get the same structured output every time, with current data.

These slash commands become your organisation’s analytical toolkit. Finance creates /budget-variance that runs Python pandas analysis, marketing builds /campaign-performance using R within Quarto, operations develops /productivity-metrics with automated data processing. Each command delivers consistent, formatted output - whether that’s Markdown tables for documentation, CSV files for Excel import, or polished reports ready for presentation.

And here’s where it gets interesting: Claude Code not only responds to slash commands, it will write them for you and create the analysis scripts that they run in R or Python.

Making the transition

You don’t need to abandon everything overnight. Start with one type of document - perhaps your meeting notes or project plans. Get comfortable with the Markdown syntax and the Claude Code interface. Once you see how much simpler it can be, you’ll naturally find yourself using it for more tasks.

The question isn’t whether AI will change how we work - it already has. The question is whether you’ll embrace a simpler, more integrated approach or continue managing multiple tools that solve yesterday’s problems.

Your bright new world of AI doesn’t require learning a dozen new applications. It just requires recognising that the work surface has evolved, and it’s time to step onto it.

If you’d like to understand more, or dip your toe in the water, contact Zuline Services.

Footnotes

1. John Gruber developed Markdown as a way to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format that could be converted to structurally valid HTML.

2. Pandoc, created by John MacFarlane, is a universal document converter that can transform between dozens of markup formats, making it the Swiss Army knife of document processing.

3. Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that combines text, code, and output into reproducible documents and websites. You’re reading this on a Quarto website which is published with a single command by Claude Code.

4. The _brand.yml file in Quarto allows you to define your organisation’s colours, fonts, logos, and styling preferences once, then automatically apply them across all documents, presentations, and websites you create.