The business world’s favourite software program enters its 40th year Count on mePhotograph: Getty Images Oct 15th 2024 https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/15/why-microsoft-excel-wont-die For many, Microsoft Excel is the epitome of corporate drudgery. Its dreaded #VALUE! error has driven an incalculable number of users to despair. Yet among financial analysts, management consultants and even the odd business journalist, the spreadsheet program, which this month entered its 40th year, is a handy tool for everything from interrogating company financials to pricing assets. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, has called it the “best consumer product” the tech giant ever made. The program even has its own world championship in Las Vegas, where spreadsheet wizards pivot, concatenate and VLOOKUP their way to victory. Excel was not the first spreadsheet for PCs. That honour belongs to VisiCalc (short for visible calculator), built in 1979 by Dan Bricklin, then a student at Harvard Business School. By 1983 a rival program, Lotus 1-2-3, had taken the lead. When Microsoft released Excel in 1985, it brought a few clever twists. Instead of recalculating every cell when one changed, it updated only the affected cells. This made it much faster, especially on early PCs. Microsoft also ditched the clunky command-line interface for an easier-to-use graphical one. Excel quickly became one of the most popular business tools. Exact figures are hard to pin down because the software is bundled with other Microsoft products, but last year the company reported that its cloud version had nearly 400m paid users. Mastery of Excel is prized: more than 100m LinkedIn users list it as a skill, compared with 61m for Google Sheets, a rival program, according to Senacea, a spreadsheet consultancy. Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders—though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19 cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden cells). Such snafus have not dented Excel’s dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren’t ready to be filtered out just yet. ■
Excel is a piece of shit, a real shame for Microsoft. Back in 2013 people started to realize how dangerous it was. In 2024 only dinosaurs use Excel. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timwor...be-the-most-dangerous-software-on-the-planet/
I've an avid user of Google Sheets for the same reasons. Never really needed Excel in my work life, but it's a generational thing and I'm a software guy so I had better options. It's a bit of a meta problem and not an actual problem with Excel itself. Because Excel is the tool that people know, they keep using it where it (from the perspective of a software dev) is clearly not reasonable, where e.g. something out of the Python ecosystem would have been reasonable. My father was an electrical engineer and like a lot of other people at his company he was pushing Excel much farther than reasonable. Got to see some hilariously complicated worksheets over the years.
the logic of this article is that if we didn’t have vaccines we would have fewer people and thus less global warming. excel is an awesome program. The calculation engine is good. It’s the humans that use it that’s bad but that exists because excel made doing modeling available to a lot more people. It used to be that to own a car you had to have a mechanic on staff to service it and drive it. Old rolls Royce’s are annoying to start because only experts needed to start them. Life is better with a push button start
At every single bank I went to: "We have an application that we have developed but.... there are excel sheets that you have to gather and analyze to see if we are missing something, we want to get rid of excel as soon as possible" I died inside every time I opened one of those files. As I said, a piece of shit.
Microsoft is making recall, mandatory (?) For those who haven't heard about this ,, new invention '', - thing is designed to make a screenshot of your desktop view in laptop / PC every ~5/30~ seconds and store it somewhere on the cloud, where, ,, only you '' can access it. ~~~Only you~~~ Only. You. Trust me bro. Wait until EU commission gets their hands on this. (hopefully)
I have used excel maybe a dozen times....some people have mastered excel so we'll there are a few who make a living teaching it to others....