Microsoft Excel at 40: From spreadsheets to AI-powered data analysis

The two most commonly used computer programs in the world are Microsoft (MS) Word and Microsoft Excel. Indeed, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella believes Excel is the best consumer product the tech giant has ever made. Despite the availability of multiple, free word processing and spreadsheet programs, billions of users are still willing to pay for these MS flagships, and Excel in particular remains the dominant player across office and personal computing ecosystems. Version 1.0 of Microsoft Excel was rolled out on September 30, 1985, about 40 years ago. Ironically, it was written for the Mac platform because Lotus 123 had a firm grip on the MS DOS systems loaded on to Microsoft computers. However, MS soon challenged Lotus 123 with Version 2.0 of Excel, which became the leader as Windows superseded DOS as an operating system and personal computers (PCs) started being offered with MS Office bundled in along with the Windows operating system.

 

Excel wasn’t the spreadsheet pioneer — Mac’s VisiCalc and Lotus 123 were among popular precursors — but it had many functions and features that were missing in earlier spreadsheets. It had an easy to navigate interface, was faster, utilised more of ever-increasing hardware capabilities, offered more functions, including many statistical and logic functions, and extended graph options. Users could also write formulae and run macros. The current versions are integrated with Cloud, offering Software as a Service (SaaS). Business users can integrate Excel with Python Scripts and use the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Copilot to build scripts with natural language instructions. An estimated 1.1 billion users have also found unusual ways to exploit Excel not only for calculating balance sheets and plotting stock price charts, but also for organising dates and planning weddings. Free competitors like Google Sheets, and Apache’s OpenOffice are quite functional, but they lag behind Excel, which has around 400 million paying users for the Cloud version. The familiar interface and extra functions continue to make it a preferred product. There is even an annual Excel World Championship.

 

Over the decades, Excel has suffered its share of absurd glitches, sometimes with users inadvertently triggering inappropriate functions. Bioscientists complain about an infamous issue where Excel interpreted certain gene names as dates, which forced scientists to rename genes like “SEPT9” to “SEPTIN9” when collating genomic data. Barclays Capital famously bought multiple assets it didn’t want — for hundreds of millions of dollars — from the bankrupt Lehman Brothers when it used a sheet with hidden rows in calculations. The London 2012 Olympics offered 10,000 more tickets to a swimming event than the venue could accommodate, as extra zeroes were inadvertently entered. Excel is also blamed for underreporting Covid-19 cases (due to running out of rows). The widespread induction of AI presents a new and different challenge in the data analysis sphere. But the introduction of AI features could help MS maintain its pole position. Despite glitches, it seems impossible to calculate the value that the iconic spreadsheet, with its familiar format of rows and columns, has given its billions of users for nearly 40 years.