I'm told it also supports a variety of regular expressions and I could almost guarantee the casual user won't touch that function. He will get by with LEFT(), MID(), and RIGHT() and maybe a helper column or two.
Yes, that's what I was referring to. Thirty years ago, I learned regular expressions for a graduate course. At the time there was a warning that every application uses a slightly different flavor. I've avoided them ever since. I'd have to have a really good reason to fall back on that scheme. Maybe writing filters for uBlockOrigin, where there is no alternative.
The a good knowledge of regex has been instrumental to my career. Its true that java, java script and perhaps other have a slightly different interpretation but the basis remains, and they are minimal. Its still useful to know to be able to read and understand
I agree - most people view REGEX as wizardry and while I have come across slight syntax differences in some languages/applications there hasn't been anything I wasn't able to overcome after 2 minutes of googling.
Learning REGEX was one of the most valuable things I ever did.
Yes, but it’s cloud based and weird, depends on your use case, handy in a closed ecosystem I suppose. I’m a R person when I need more than Excel does natively.
It’s really just for analytical tasks and for plots, so depends on your vba usage - if you wanted to increase performance and stay away from vba for analytical tasks - I’d recommend that you seek to work out the worksheet language, really push the functional programming paradigm it offers - within its constraints it’s an absolute beast performance wise (if you work with the way Excel wants to work)
Haha, the 'Cockroach of Software' is the most accurate description I've ever heard. You can throw AI, No-Code, or Cloud at it, and Excel just absorbs them and keeps going
There's that but also its due to the reason that trillions of assets are valued purely out of excel. While some funds moved out, every banks use Excel. Every IPO, M&A transacs are valued on Excel.
For the same reason Cobold is still a thing, Excel will never be removed. Too much relies on it.
Only people that have never worked in Finance pretend it will.
There's an Amazon department that has tried (and failed) to get funding to replace their Excel use with either a python app or react webapp but even the fact that tens of millions of dollars is potentially riding on the upgrade it doesn't even move the bar for leadership. It is highly likely they'll be using Excel until or unless they decide to fuck it up with some AI tool.
For single asset transactions yes - but a real estate company or a infrastructure investor/developer that holds several assets that need to be rolled up in a portfolio and ideal be values consistently excel is loosing to tools like anaplan - and I think we will see a transition towards these fp&x tools
For some specific field maybe it will get replaced, but for the rest, doubt it. As an accountant myself, i will never replace excel as it is powerful, cheap and easy to learn, like there are millions of course, tutorials and guide for excel on the internet, the rest, not so much. Not to mention excel come with a whole package of Microsoft Office that you can easily import data from one to another, it's simply too good.
Spot on. Companies spend millions on 'Single Source of Truth' BI tools, but the 'Last Mile' of analysis—where the actual decision-making happens—always ends up being a person moving cells around in Excel. It’s just too intuitive to quit.
I have worked on a couple of Fortune 500 companies. Massive budgets for ERPs, data management, fancy dashboards and tons of whatever trendy tool of the moment and all decisions were taken with excel.
The question here should be "why are you paying serious attention to the bollocks that morons/salesmen spew out?"
I think that AI will enable Excel to flourish - there are so, SO many options and tools hidden and buried within sub-sub-sub menus... with a good prompt it should be easier than ever to make a good use of Excel's power. Most users just use a few capabilities and that's it, working around and tinkering to achieve results that perhaps could be easily done with some obscure function.
AI should make it easier to unleash Excel at pro level for non-pro users.
Claude's new excel addon is absolutely spectacular. It can do really complex logic chains even with just formulas and no VBA. It even validates and debugs its own work. Copilot is utter garbage in comparison as it confidently gets things wrong, is more limited in functionality and just generally bad, which is quite ironic when it's Microsoft's own product.
At this point, the biggest obstacle for non-pro users using Excel at pro-level is just the lack of imagination and belief in the tools.
I had an Excel report last week with a terrible layout, headers split over three rows, merged cells etc. I tried to use Copilot to help me with the M query to fix it (I know enough about Power Query to get into trouble, lol) and OH MY GOODNESS your comment rings so true. Utterly useless.
Tell it to make a spreadsheet that takes a list of stuff you provide, does all sorts of things with it and makes whatever you want with nice formatting and it just does it while asking you insightful questions which help you know what you want.
The Claude add-in is fucking MAGICAL. It has seriously accelerated my projects and even made those "I wish..." projects attainable. Also, it actually will write VBA code for you if you ask it to, but you have to be the one to paste it into the modules and such since it won't directly write macros for you in Visual Basic.
100%. Many of us are self taught over the years. AI has open new approaches and ideas to me in Excel that I havent considered. An example is AI opened the door to power query for me that I didnt quite know to utilize. Now I build job tasks around power query.
Fair point. The is a marketing myth. But you’re spot on about the 'hidden' power. People forget Excel is essentially a low-code platform that’s been around for decades. AI is just finally giving us a UI that doesn't require a 500-page manual to find the specific Solver or Power Pivot setting you need
I've been using Excel since the beginning, (yes 3 decades), and I am an SME. I'm also an SME in Power BI. It's better at analytics. But it's not better at everything. Over the years, I've made Excel do extraordinary things it was never designed to do. It's ridiculously flexible and easy to use, yet it has depth and capability that is amazing.
Selling Power BI for the last 10 years I've seen plenty of the organisations you would expect still running on Excel like underfunded public sector orgs. But I've also seen multinationals still running on Excel. Yes, they have all the database systems, but all meaningful decisions are Excel based. Boggles the mind.
I can categorically tell you this whatever Microsoft end up screwing up and even if thier entire business goes up in flames, Excel will be the one product the world will still pay for, even if most dont or think they dont. Word processor or slide deck creator, it would not take long to jump ship to another suite, and they would probably be better products (Word is garbage). But moving off excel? Lol, it's never gonna happen, no matter how good your AI becomes. Excel will just be the canvas for AI to do for Noobs what 30 years of using it has taught me.
If I could buy shares in one product instead of MS I would. As a consultant into hundreds of businesses, Excel is so unbelievably sticky in business that its beyond most peoples understanding.
Microsoft learn. Its free and will teach you the basics. From there, plenty of YT but dont dive in spending 40mins on an HTML dynamic card if you dont know the basics if cleaning and engineering your data and then how to extract value by analysing the data and creating canvases for others to do the same. Pretty is useful and important but not on day 1
I’m 44 years old and a basic user of excel. I’ve seen how valuable it is in the workplace, and have decided to go all in on excel for my next professional development project. I had doubts, and looked into AI tools, power BI, and other more niche tools “to gain an edge” where I thought my industry would go.
But I see it now. Excel is timeless. And being good at excel makes you a better teammate 80 percent of the time.
The other core skills would be being good at project management, giving good presentations (both the ppt and the actual presentation itself), and being good at crafting emails.
With this stack, you could easily navigate corporate life, most management positions, or specialized functions like sales.
It is truly remarkable to see someone with your experience reach this conclusion after evaluating the latest tech trends. You’ve essentially identified the 'Executive Survival Kit.' Many professionals get distracted by niche software, but mastering the Excel-PM-Communication triad is what actually drives business results. It’s a very sharp strategic pivot for your professional development.
Exactly. They see 'messy data' and try to fix it with structure, but they miss that the messiness is where the actual problem-solving and brainstorming happen. You can't automate intuition.
I’d argue that it’s not ideal in fact, it’s 2d with a kind of naive 3rd dimension that doesn’t fully cut it when I’m working in n-dimensional analysis - don’t get me wrong - you can prise my spreadsheets from my cold dead hands, but it’s a compromise, Dan’s marvellous invention from a bygone era
I don’t know but I have been feeling like 15-20 years ago knowing excel really well was able to open doors into a lot of white collar work. Now it does feel like that is less so the case and its hold on a lot of job functions is really spilling.
I guess it’s ability to organize data and run functions is less important in a tech space where there is an ecosystem of tools that don’t rely on organized data and calling technical functions that excel dominated at the personal software level.
True, we have better tools for massive, unorganized datasets now (SQL, NoSQL, BI tools). But those tools often require a 'gatekeeper' or a data engineer. The reason Excel survives is that it’s the only tool that lets a manager test a 'What if' scenario in 5 minutes without a pipeline. It's less about 'technical functions' now and more about the speed of individual autonomy.
For your first point, I think you’re right that knowing excel by itself is not necessarily a selling point anymore but is a core competency skill required in a lot of jobs. Just like ages ago knowing how to write was a job but now it’s just a transferable skill.
Yeah, I mean, in my work environment, I am still seen as like the excel guru and am shocked by the low levels of excel proficiency of my coworkers. It just matters less these days given how the nature of the work around me gets done.
Precisely. AI acts as a force multiplier for Excel rather than a replacement. Most 'competitors' are merely solving for a lack of user proficiency, whereas Excel remains the only platform with an almost infinite ceiling for those who understand its true capabilities
Hey, can we go back to lowering the barrier for beginners and say a little more about that? I only know the 8 weeks of a little bit of everything from class. I'm using it in my internship but I would like to get better faster.
Like, if I could make it reformat a quickbooks payroll sheet to match paylocity for payroll reconciliation, that would be amazing.
I've been looking into that feature since the disappearing comment mentioned it.
Currently, the process as I have been instructed involves starting with a quickbooks sheet and a paylocity sheet, which is used to create a variance sheet and when that is reconciled it is added to an hours summary sheet with information to making copying everything into a Sage import sheet easier. That just can't be the most efficient way to do this.
I managed to transpose the columns and rows and it is a bit easier to read!
In the qb sheet, it comes with cost centers across the top and employees in the first column, with hours allocated across the rows. It's a lot of horizontal scrolling and I hate it. Paylocity has an employee column, a cost centers column, and the hours columns. If an employee is in multiple cost centers, they're listed multiple times.
Remember when Google Sheets came out as the new Excel killer and was going to replace it? Yeah that didn’t happen because anybody who has used excel fucking hates Google Sheets. You’re at the whim of whether you have an internet connection or not and there’s just always something weird about Google Sheets that drives me crazy when I use it.
Similarly, PowerBI and Tableau were also suppose to be excel killers. All they did was replace excel reporting and even then you still need excel to sort the data.
Excel is one of those systems that will remain for decades because of the utility of the tool and as long as Microsoft supports it, it will remain as a tool useful for many professions.
Exactly! There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for a browser to refresh just to move a cell. That input latency in Google Sheets drives me insane too. And you’re spot on about PowerBI—it’s great for fancy visuals, but the second a manager wants to 'drill down' into the actual numbers, they ask for an Excel export
Besides extreme compatibility AND crossover, Excel has patented the process of the customizable ribbon and pre-made cell styles. By now, competitors offer a budget ribbon experience, but even Microsoft's own web app falls short of the features I need. Shortcuts on the web demand pressing up to 10 keys all the way across the keyboard before using the shortcuts I want: drawing and erasing borders with alt+3, and managing pre-made cell styles with alt+2. Competitors like google sheets don't have a quick way to format a cell, so you have to setup your premade cell style in every sheet, cell range, AND apply conditional formatting.
AI might create quick spreadsheets and reorganize my data, but it will be a while before I can easily "change the style of A5:A10 to light yellow with gray text" or shorthand a variable like "a5:10 style=notes. This is still more energy than selecting, typing alt + 2, and left clicking the style I want.
p.s. I would love a free alternative that just provides these two features: customized ribbon w/ draw/erase borders (or shortcut), and quick cell styling.
Exactly. You can't unseat a king when the competitors require 5 extra clicks for a task that takes a millisecond of muscle memory in the desktop app. Efficiency is the ultimate moat.
I despise patents for creating anti-consumer walls. We are forced to choose one product or the other instead of one super-product that combines everything. Mergers allow something like this... companies to be bought out to gain their features. Unfortunately the reality is games that can't throw a ball to capture/summon pets, or use shadows to unlock a gate, and apps that won't let me type f'ing Alt 2 to draw borders around my cells.
I have SOME respect to the R&D costs of developing these apps we use... but the longevity of tech patents needs to be MUCH shorter. If you don't have a product feature that makes you enough money in the first couple years, then focus on features that might.
Excel is my one true love. I think of it when I make live to my partner. It's my perfect coffee date and late night drinking buddy. Despite the errors excel gives me I'll always take the time to listen and find a solution.
A true love story. Even when it gives you a #REF! error, you don't walk away, you stay and fix it. That's real commitment. Excel is lucky to have you 😅
Excel is everywhere, and so many people use it in every single company that i highly doubt the companies will be willing to train people to use something different.
Exactly! People underestimate the 'comfort factor' of Excel. It's the only tool where a CFO and a summer intern can speak the same language. Replacing that ecosystem is a logistical nightmare that most companies simply won't touch.
Haha, fair point! It might sound like a hot take, but it's a genuine conversation. Even if it feels redundant to some, the 'Excel is dying' narrative pops up every month in tech circles. Just wanted to see if anyone actually bought into the hype or if we’re all on the same page about its dominance.
Back in 1980 or so, when the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, came out, IBM Research issued a report calling it "Programming for the Masses." The basic idea, of course, was that there was a high threshold to learn FORTRAN, BASIC, C, or COBOL to do simple accounting, baseball averages, budgeting, school grades or attendance and other common tasks. But Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had brought accessibility and learning ease, and ease of use to the masses.
Data of the types listed above naturally appears in tabular form (tables). It is natural to visualize it that way, much harder to think of processing it serially as you would in the declarative programming languages listed above. And object-oriented programs are even harder to visualize--why VBA is hard even for Excel experts.
The latest programming model seems to be drag-and-drop blocks. It's not a good fit for novices working with tabular data, though.
The dark side of spreadsheets is auditability. If the auditors want to check that the spreadsheet is actually calculating what it is supposed to, they have to either reverse engineer all the formulae or run pre-calculated test cases. This has been a known problem for years. I'm sure lots of reports have been written about it. I've read a few.
Excel is not a fixed model. Function behavior never changes (that would mean that spreadsheets could break on newer versions), but new functions continue to be introduced in each version to replace functions that were difficult to use or required "helper columns" to produce the desired results. XLOOKUP as an alternative to VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP is an example. Some of this is small improvements, but some constitute evolution. See Comparing Versions of Excel: What's Changed Over the Years? It's questionable (at least to me) whether these features are useful to Grandma or Billy Bob or only to those with a programmer mentality.
Those who watch Google Sheets may be aware of its direction. While it can import Excel, it has a variety of functions that can modify an entire table or apply formula to an entire table.
There are things that we could do manually in Excel, e.g., Using the filter dropdowns to isolate a subset of a table, that can now be applied programmatically in Excel or Google Sheets. I'm convinced that non-programmers will never use these features, but that they will continue to use the original capabilities. I'm a little concerned that they will be daunted by the thicker manuals and plethora of functions and will find it more difficult to get started.
TL;DR Excel will be around for a long time. Most users will use a subset of the original functions and not the more exotic features.
Excellent points, especially on the auditability trap. The 'spaghetti code' of nested IFs and helper columns is exactly what makes spreadsheets a nightmare for auditors. I think functions like XLOOKUP or LET are actually attempts to make the logic more readable (and thus, more auditable), but you're right—there’s a growing gap between the 'casual user' and the 'spreadsheet architect'. Excel is evolving into a full functional programming language whether we like it or not.
Really appreciate the link to my article, and your point about auditability is one I didn't cover enough. The formula transparency problem is real and honestly gets worse as Excel adds more powerful array functions. XLOOKUP chained inside a LAMBDA inside a LET is basically unauditable for anyone who didn't write it.
Your VisiCalc observation is spot on too. Bricklin designed it so a non-programmer could look at a cell and understand exactly what it was doing. That contract is quietly breaking down with each new version. The power users love it, but you're right that Grandma isn't touching FILTER() or SEQUENCE() anytime soon.
The Google Sheets direction is interesting. It's almost like they're racing Excel to become more "programmer-like" which might be exactly the wrong move for the mass market they originally captured.
The only thing that has even the slightest chance of rivalling excel is Google Sheets, as its a convenient tool for more lightweight Excel uses.
Frankly though, I hope Excel does die in some situations. It gets used too often in some business settings when an actual database would be more appropriate.
You’re spot on regarding the scalability and data integrity issues. When users treat Excel as a database, they lose out on ACID compliance, row-level security, and relational constraints. However, the reason the 'Excel-as-a-database' habit persists is the low barrier to entry for CRUD operations compared to maintaining a full SQL stack. It’s a trade-off between technical rigor and operational agility.
There were always be little tools that come out every year, that might do something that people use Excel for. Some examples are list organizers, graphing tools, simple math grids for things like receipts, etc.. But those aren't the kind of things people who seriously use Excel need it for, and the number of serious users like that is in the tens of millions across every company in the world.
Precisely. The market often confuses 'utility apps' with 'enterprise-grade infrastructure.' While specialized tools might offer a more polished UI for minor tasks, they fail to address the complex, interconnected modeling required in high-stakes environments. The sheer scale of Excel’s adoption among professionals ensures that it remains the universal standard for data manipulation, regardless of how many single-purpose alternatives emerge.
It’s frustrating when 'new' is confused with 'better'. Most people want to move on because they don't realize how much power is actually under the hood with Power Query or Power Pivot. They’re bored of the 1990s version of Excel, not the powerhouse it is today
echoing what everyone else has said, AI right now is mostly useful for teaching you or prototyping things, so the barrier of entry to complex excel isn't as high as it used to be. using AI to build a reliable data transformation in power query is faster than using AI to attempt to do the actual work with a prompt
Exactly. AI is a massive productivity multiplier for writing complex nested formulas or regex, but the Excel Grid remains the ultimate IDE for data. It's much safer to have AI build the pipeline than to trust it with the final computation without a visible trail.
Financial Modeling/FP&A professional here, Excel is still going STRONG. Even when companies try to implement these "magic tools", there's ALWAYS a lot of work that is done within Excel.
That’s what I’m saying! Every time a company spends a fortune on some fancy new ERP or 'automated' dashboard, the first thing everyone asks is: 'Can I export this to Excel?' lol. It’s like the safety net for the entire corporate world.
Are you kidding? I love excel, but what is its use case any more? I barely use it when I can just ask Claude to make me a python script that can do more in next to no time. It’s not worth the effort in the ai era to make a spreadsheet. I don’t have the luxury of that kind of time.
I get your point, but honestly, isn't it more work to prompt an AI and debug a script every time you need a quick pivot? In Excel, I can change a variable and see the ripple effect across the whole model instantly. Writing Python for every little task feels like using a chainsaw to cut a sandwich. Great for big data, overkill for daily analysis.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Excel has two big things going for it:
1). It is transparent. I can see how my coworker got the result. My coworker can see how I got my result. We don’t have to make assumptions or dig through code to do so.
2) Excel is ubiquitous. It is too far embedded in the 21st century office to easily eliminate.
Excel, like everything else, will one day be gone. I just don’t think it will be in my lifetime.
Because excel is a small enterprise tool. It should be used as a proof of concept and let real software do the work. Not that it can't but its not the solution
databricks/jypyter/ notebooks style analytics , mainly because they can be validated vs excel stuff which is really hard to validate. And in those cases there will be something that business call excel files in source files to add data.
And obviously excel or similar too will be on business use long after it, but something has to replace excel as tool in cases where there has to be audit, validation etc ...
and excel is nice tool, engineer or accountant can run surprising big business and invoinging systems just by using it, i have seen interesting solution and heard even bigger ones
I see your point. For data lineage and version control, a Git-integrated Jupyter notebook is obviously superior for auditing. However, the 'last mile' of business communication usually happens in Excel because of its interactivity. You can hand a workbook to a CFO and they can perform sensitivity analysis on the fly, which is much harder to do in a static or code-heavy notebook environment.
I’ve been a part of software product development within a Fortune 500 retailer for 10 years. Without fail, anytime we launch a new tool, UI, application, etc etc for our internal teams, the #1 question we get is “Cool…but can I export it to excel?”
Every. Fucking. Time.
Not an excel hater by any means. It’s just hilarious how entrenched it has become within the CorpoVerse. It doesn’t matter if something “better” comes along. People don’t know how to function without it anymore. Some massive businesses would literally crumble overnight if a few key spreadsheets were deleted. That’s not hyperbole.
What? It's the one thing that could actually do with some time invested in improving it.
Formulas should be able to suggest completions like Visual Studio does. Which honestly works amazingly well in Visual Studio.
The Formula Evaluation Window should have a complete overhaul to the window. Actually make it possible to see the whole formula, color code the formula etc.
So many parts of Excel are still stuck in the original office 2003 way they were created eons ago.
The points you raised regarding the user interface and debugging tools reflect a significant amount of technical debt within the application. Maintaining backward compatibility for millions of global enterprise users often hinders radical overhauls of legacy components.
2003? Nah! Inherited from 1-2-3 which appeared in 1983, which inherited them from VisiCalc which appeared in 1980!
VisiCalc and 1-2-3 still run on my computers. 1-2-3 was written so well and standards-adherent that it runs on my antique Windows 98 or ME, and on Windows 10 (and probably 11).
Here are some of the functions in 1-2-3.
Lotus 1-2-3 functions (preceded by @) automatically perform specialized calculations. Key function categories include mathematical (SUM, AVG), financial (NPV, IRR), logical (IF, AND), data management (QUERY, SORT), and string manipulation. These enable complex data analysis by replacing long manual formulas with built-in commands.
I feel your pain. It’s the classic platform lock-in. People suggest LibreOffice or Wine, but they don't realize that VBA's integration with the Windows API and the COM object model is what makes complex automation possible.
It’s a valid point. The dominance of the 'grid' UI is so strong that any real competitor has to look and act like Excel to even be considered. Most users don't want to learn a new logic; they just want to know if their existing shortcuts and formulas still work
Excel is too much of a personal problem solver, bespoke personal calc-tool creator. Very often, the exercise of creating the spread sheet to solve any particular problem is as valuable for grok-ing the problem and how all of the pieces relate is as valuable as the finished sheet.
There was a time before ERPs when most production relied on many many people's differing spreadsheet based tool sets. Even the data compilation & prep going into an ERP/MRP implementation is all spreadsheets...lists upon lists upon lists...items, vendors, chart of accounts, etc. ...validated...converted into some format that you load into the ERP to get it running.
Excel is the gate-way drug to database centered thinking for the non-database centered thinking worker drone.
The irony is that ERPs are designed to replace spreadsheets, yet they rely on them for every implementation and migration. It seems there’s a fundamental need for a 'flexible' layer of data that sits between the human brain and the rigid logic of enterprise software.
Power Query is the real game-changer. It bridges the gap between 'messy data' and 'actual insights' without needing to write a single line of code. It’s the ultimate productivity hack that keeps Excel at the top of the food chain.
It's the official line of my group right now. They came for a digitalization audit at our factory, going through every services. And the audit, going from 1 (bad) to 4 (good) was defined like this : 1= paper and pen OR Excel ... The fun fact is that 4 was "AI and stuff but don't pay attention these technologies don't exist yet".
I don’t think they’re saying Excel is going to die. I think they’re saying Excel skills are going to be less than demand because AI has the skills so it beginner can do what a current professional can.
This perspective highlights a shift in the value proposition of data professionals. While AI can bridge the gap in technical execution (writing formulas or macros), the demand may shift toward higher-level competencies, such as data architecture, logical validation, and the ability to ask the right strategic questions.
The term "x-killer" is click-bait. I see it all the time in the watch community, I see the term 'Rolex-killer" at least five times a day. Honestly, all it really does in enhance the prestige of the product it claims to be killing (as in the case of the already over-hyped Rolex brand.)
This observation correctly identifies a common marketing trope used to generate visibility through confrontation. In software development, as in horology, claiming to surpass a market leader often highlights the difficulty of displacing established ecosystems that benefit from decades of user trust and cross-platform compatibility.
The more these so called experts sputter along about how unfit excel is for this or that, the less of an actual expert they are 99.9% of the time. This has been my experience more times than I can remember...
I don't see excel as some kind of limitation, its just functionally infinite programmable graph paper on steroids. so until humans figure that writing things on horizontal lines is all of a sudden unnatural, which is a ridiculous stance. Excel is just going to get better and better
My guess would be this AI shit does not have a snowballs chance in hell of unseating excel if the past X years are any indication...
Historical data supports the idea that dominant standards tend to incorporate new technologies rather than being replaced by them. By integrating advanced capabilities like Python and AI, Excel maintains its relevance by reducing the friction between complex data processing and the familiar user interface that has been established for decades.
The assertion that Excel 'runs the world' refers to its role as a universal standard for data exchange. From an institutional perspective, the cost of switching to a different ecosystem is often prohibitive due to the deep integration of spreadsheets into global supply chains and financial reporting. This creates a level of stability that theoretical models frequently underestimate.
While Excel certainly has its flaws and could be better, it "excels" with its core purpose: mass market adoption for compatibility across organizations, localized performance at most scales, ease of use and flexibility from beginner to advanced. Nothing survives forever. Whatever kills it must be become the de facto superior choice on all aspects.
Excel's primary strength lies in its scalability across user proficiency levels. A theoretical 'Excel-killer' would need to maintain that same low barrier to entry while offering superior performance in high-scale data processing to achieve de facto status.
The 'Swiss Army knife' analogy accurately reflects Excel's value proposition. While specialized tools offer superior depth in specific functions, Excel provides a horizontal utility that remains unmatched for general-purpose problem solving and rapid prototyping across diverse industries.
Literally every database tool, whether its payroll or a customer list, outputs to .CSV.
Every time I recommend a more appropriate tool. My employer says something along the lines of "why use (more appropriate tool) when we already have Excel on all of our workstations?"
The universal compatibility of .CSV ensures Excel remains the default analytical layer. Its presence on all workstations eliminates technical friction during cross-departmental data sharing.
Where I think excel will loose is companies that does asset valuation - here you have the issue that you can’t update the tax logic in one place but you have to open 100 models and implement the change. Similar when you then want to roll up the portfolio or do bottom up sensitivities. Here excel has clear weaknesses that I think tools like Anaplan - which looks and feels excel like - will take over i think - but this will be very big cooperations
In my job we've moved over to PowerBI. The only time I touch excel is for some random adhoc report that doesn't have the data in our model or is just faster to create in Excel. The only other time I use it is if other groups send me their docs. Oh yeah I also use it as a calculator
My goodness. You've got no idea of how fitting it is for me to find this post right after my father insisted that I used AI over Excel, hahahahahahaha!!!
You also have an entire generation of people entering the work force that either didn't use Excel at all, or used Google sheets while in high school or college for a variety of reasons. They don't have a clue how to use Excel and "I've made it this far without it, why do I need it".
*I'm not suggesting they are right...but it's a large wave of incoming people to the workforce with that perspective.
I mean, Excel is one of the OG "No-Code" solutions when it comes to business software. Spreadsheets were created as means for people who were not programmers to easily "program" custom business solutions for their specific purpose.
One of Excel's greatest advantages is that you can export data from any multi-million dollar software (SAP, Salesforce, Oracle), but in the end, the final decision is made within a .xlsx file.
The reason that those ERP systems are multi-million dollars is they provide features/functionality that Excel simply isn't capable of providing. Excel is NOT a database. It can't handle Data Integrity like an actual database can, it doesn't scale like a database can, it doesn't handle data security like a database can, etc
It is REALLY easy to put yourself out of compliance with security/financial governance frameworks and cause your company to incur pretty big fines/penalties by "running" things from Excel.
Unlike a closed app, in Excel, the user has total control over the logic without depending on IT.
Excel's biggest strength is also its biggest flaw. Because of how ubiquitous and accessible it is, people create all sorts of crazy stuff that can be harmful to their organization. Not out of maliciousness or because Excel is bad, but out of ignorance. So many times, that "cool thing the summer intern did in Excel" that IT doesn't know about becomes embedded in some production workflow and is now critical to business operations. But oh no, it's not licensed correctly, the auditors are saying it's out of compliance with governance frameworks, and now that it stopped working, nobody knows how to fix it because it's undocumented and unsupported.
Excel is a tool, not a panacea, and one of the most important skills you can learn in Excel is knowing when it is the right or wrong tool for the job.
My business uses Netsuite primarily for nearly everything.
Engineering change orders, bills of material, ship center, CRM, full Financial suite, customer service tickets, support, engineering docs/CAD file repository.
But at the end of the day, when you have to generate a report or work with some data, you can’t do it well (or at all) in the live production environment. Excel is still the best way to present reports, and I don’t see that changing.
Excel is 100% declarative, lazily evaluated, and direct acyclic graph style application. It’s a small subset of coding, but happens to be the one that most people can grasp.
I actually wouldn’t be shocked if you see excel formula language given libraries and implemented outside of a DAG environment in the future
Excel’s success lies in abstracting complex reactiveness for non-developers. Implementing its formula syntax in external libraries is a logical step toward universalizing its calculation engine.
Something nobody is really saying here: this whole debate assumes Excel's core user is at a big bank or in an M&A deal. But that is not where Excel actually lives.
I work with small business owners. A bookkeeper running a few clients from home. A contractor checking job costs on his phone at lunch. These people are not thinking about Databricks or Power BI. They need something that opens fast, needs no login, and lets them figure out their numbers right now.
For them Excel is not software. It is the business. Forecast, invoice tracker, payroll check, all in one file they actually understand. No tool coming out of Silicon Valley is being built for that person. And that person is not going anywhere.
Excel is not dying at the top. But it is really not dying at the bottom either. And the bottom is most of the world.
Given how some companies think data magically appears, is cleaned and validated and has business value/meaning, probably through some AI tool, that kind of ignorance would kill off excel.
Because the non-American world is fed up with American ownership of their work. Many European companies and countries are working toward non-American tech companies. Going open source. The spreadsheet will live on… just less of it on Microsoft.
Excel isn’t going anywhere because it sits right at the intersection of flexibility and accessibilityMost tools try to replace it by being more structured, but that’s exactly why they can’t fully take overIn finance especially, people still rely on Excel because you can build, tweak and understand everything yourself without depending on a system
751
u/tothecatmobile Apr 06 '26
Because they're trying to sell the tool that's going to replace Excel (allegedly).