You have a tab with four thousand rows and one column that needs judgment on every one of them: sort the free-text notes into categories, normalize the company names, rewrite the descriptions. Claude can do that work. What stops you is the handoff. You paste a block of rows in, read the answer, paste it back, and lose your place. A script would do it in one pass but only does exactly what you spelled out, and writes straight into the live sheet.
Scratch changes where the edit happens. Claude does 99% of the work, reading and rewriting your rows as files on your laptop. The last 1%, deciding which cells actually reach the sheet, stays with you. Nothing is written to Google until you have seen the change next to the original value and approved it.
How it works
- Scratch pulls your tabs into files. Sign in with Google and paste the URL of each spreadsheet Scratch may touch. Every tab becomes a table, row 1 becomes the field names, and Scratch adds one managed
Scratch IDcolumn in position A so row identity survives sorting. - Claude edits the rows. Open the folder in the Claude desktop app. Try a prompt on 50 rows in Chat, then let Cowork or Code run the whole tab. Sort every note into one of these six categories and leave the rest of the row alone. Claude edits the files, never your live sheet.
- You review every diff and publish. Scratch shows each changed cell next to its original value. Approve what ships, and Scratch writes only those cells. Everything you did not approve keeps its value and its number format.
What people use it for
Most people arrive with a sheet that grew past the point where anyone maintains it consistently.
- Sort a column of free-text notes into the dropdown categories you report on.
- Normalize company names, job titles, industries, and country codes across a whole export.
- Rewrite a product or content column for the entire catalog in one reviewed batch.
- Fill blank cells from what the rest of the row already says.
- Flag and merge the duplicates three people created in three styles.
Pull 50 rows to feel the loop, then point Claude at the whole tab.
Why not a Sheets MCP server?
An MCP server, or an Apps Script with your credentials, gives Claude a live write path into the spreadsheet. Every edit lands in the cell immediately, with no diff, no batch, and nothing to reject. On four thousand rows, one confident pass is the whole sheet, and you find out by scrolling.
Scratch gives Claude the same full read and write access, but against a local copy. The publish step is pulled out and handed to you. Claude can change any cell; only you commit it. Every published change is reversible per row.
What Claude edits in Google Sheets
- Text, number, checkbox, and dropdown columns
- Dates, datetimes, currency, and percentages, as real typed values rather than strings
- New rows, appended below your data
- Row deletions, applied bottom-up so nothing shifts underneath
Scratch touches one thing in your sheet that you did not put there: the Scratch ID column in position A, which carries row identity. Columns with an empty header are invisible to Scratch and never read or written. For the full picture, see Scratch for Google Sheets.
Questions people ask
Which of my spreadsheets can Claude see?
Only the ones whose URLs you pasted. Scratch asks Google for the spreadsheets scope and no Drive scope at all, so it cannot list your files, browse folders, open a spreadsheet you did not hand it, or delete anything. You edit that list later from Edit Connection.
Will it wreck my formatting?
No. Approved changes are written cell by cell, so a cell nobody touched keeps its value and its number format. Dropdown validation, checkboxes, and date formats stay as you set them.
What is the Scratch ID column?
Row position is not an identity: sort the tab and row 400 becomes row 12. So Scratch manages one column headed Scratch ID in position A and stamps a short id into it. It arrives gray, with the header frozen and a warning on the range. Rows you add by hand get an id on the next pull.
Can I undo a change after it publishes?
Yes. Every published change is reversible from Scratch, per row. The original value sits next to the rewrite until you decide which one stays.
Can it handle a few thousand rows?
Yes, that is the use case. Run 50 rows to settle the prompt, then let Cowork or Code work the whole tab. Reading files instead of paging an API is what makes the full pass practical.
Do I need to be technical?
No. Connecting is a Google sign-in and a pasted spreadsheet URL. After that the loop is the same as any Scratch source: point Claude at the folder and approve the diffs.
See it on your own sheet
The fastest way to trust it is to watch it run on your data. Book a 30-minute demo on your own spreadsheet →, or try Scratch free and run the first pass yourself.