Alloovium in Microsoft Excel

The Excel add-in plugs into Microsoft 365 Excel as a task pane. It understands the active sheet's structure, knows the active Alloovium project, and writes back to the workbook only through a single auditable path — every mutation runs inside one Excel.run transaction, so a partially-applied register is impossible.

The pane has three tabs in the bottom nav:

1. 1

   Install the add-in

   Centrally deployed via the M365 admin centre or sideloaded per machine. See the install guide.

2. 2

   Open the workbook

   Any .xlsx — on disk, OneDrive, or SharePoint. New blank workbooks work too.

3. 3

   Click "Open Alloovium" in the Home ribbon

   The task pane appears on the right.

4. 4

   Sign in and pick the project

   First-run only. The same project picker as the web app — pick whichever contract or project this workbook is for. If the add-in recognises the workbook (see below), it'll suggest a project for you.

The first thing the add-in does is look at the active sheet. It samples the header row and a handful of sample rows, and asks the backend to classify the sheet — obligation register, variation register, milestone schedule, or something else. The detected sheet type appears in the context bar and tunes the suggested actions.

Separately, when you open a workbook, the add-in tries to recognise it as a project you already have in Alloovium. The match scores filename, sheet names, and header/sample-row content against your accessible projects. A confident match shows a banner suggesting that project; you can accept or dismiss it per-document.

The Chat tab is conversational Q&A over the active project, with the active workbook as live context. Every chat message sends a workbook context block — the header row, up to thirty sample rows, and the current selection — wrapped in XML delimiters that the LLM treats as untrusted data, not instructions.

The intent classifier routes every message to one of six intents:

The Workflows tab is a hub. Clicking any card swaps the body to that workflow's sub-view; a back arrow in the sub-view header returns to the hub.

• Fill Template — the hero card. Mirrors the Word add-in's Document Fill: point it at a template-shaped sheet, pick a Vault, and the planner drafts a value for each blank with a source citation, then writes the full batch into the workbook in one atomic transaction.
• Obligations Register — opens the obligations sub-view (see below). Build the register from the project's parsed contracts, filter, and sync into the sheet.
• Variations Register — opens the variations sub-view (see below). Houses the change-order register plus three sub-tools: LD Calculator, Flow-Down Checker, Milestone Dates.

The Obligations Register sub-view builds an auditable obligation register from the project's parsed contracts. Point it at a project Vault and it produces one row per obligation with party, action, due date, cadence, severity, clause reference, and the verbatim source text.

The Variations Register sub-view covers change-order workflows. Extract variations from notices, RFIs, and instructions into a structured register; or build a fresh variation log from scratch. Each row shows VO number, status pill, cost impact, time impact, source clause, approver, and submitted date.

• Send for approval — kick a variation into the project approval workflow without leaving Excel.
• Sync to sheet — write the full register into A1:H{N+1} with a dark header row.

The same sub-view exposes three calculators, opened in an overlay:

Anything Chat is about to write to the sheet — register rows, formula changes, formatting — passes through the Edits tab first. It's the approvals queue: three segments at the top of the tab.

• Awaiting me — edits assigned to you for review, with an op-kind chip summary, the first three operations, and a "Show all N operations" toggle for the rest.
• Submitted — edits you've sent to someone else for review.
• History — applied and rejected edits, filterable and exportable to CSV.

Accepting an edit runs the operations inside one Excel.run transaction. A StatusPill at the top surfaces the outcome honestly — "Applied locally — Vault copy unchanged" on apply (the workbook changes; the Vault copy only updates when you sync it), "Edit rejected · Vault unchanged" on reject.

Every edit plan — whether it came from Chat, Fill Template, or a register sync — is validated before it is allowed anywhere near your workbook. Validation runs at preview time and again at apply time:

• Range bounds — every target must be a well-formed A1 reference inside the sheet's real bounds.
• Size caps — a single edit is capped at 200 operations, each touching at most 10,000 cells; larger plans are rejected outright rather than partially applied.
• Formula safety — proposed formulas run through a denylist of dangerous functions, and formulas that reference external workbooks are rejected.
• Precondition hashes — when a plan is previewed, the add-in fingerprints the cells it is about to touch. At apply time it re-checks those fingerprints inside the Excel.run transaction — if the data changed underneath the plan (you kept editing, a colleague saved over it), the apply refuses instead of writing onto stale assumptions.

• Offline runs queue. Online status is surfaced in the header. When offline, chat plan and populate calls go onto a durable queue (cap 50, 24 h TTL) and replay when you reconnect. Reads serve from React Query's cache where available.
• Sheet detection is heuristic. Unusual layouts may misclassify — re-detect manually if the suggested actions don't fit.
• Sheet size matters. Very large sheets (tens of thousands of rows) sample slowly. Filter or work on a smaller range when possible.
• Bulk delete capped at 500 rows. The Obligations bulk-delete action processes up to 500 obligation IDs per request — paginate larger removals.
• Edit plans capped at 200 operations, 10,000 cells per operation. Break very large writes into smaller plans — the validator rejects oversized plans rather than partially applying them.

• →Install the add-in on your machine or push it to your team via the M365 admin centre.
• →The Word add-in — same patterns, applied to documents instead of registers.
• →The Outlook add-in — thread summaries, review-before-send, and email filing.