Microsoft Excel Turns 40, Remains Stubbornly Unkillable (bloomberg.com) 82
Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft's current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 -- the bundle including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint -- increased 17% year over year, and consumer revenue rose 28%.
The software traces its origins to a 1983 Microsoft offsite under the code name Odyssey, where engineers set out to clone Lotus 1-2-3. That program had itself cloned VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet, created by Dan Bricklin for the Apple II in the late 1970s. Bricklin never patented VisiCalc. "Financially it would have been great if we'd have been able to patent it," he told Bloomberg. "And there would be a Bricklin Building at MIT, instead of a Gates Building."
Excel now counts an estimated 500 million paying users. The Pentagon pays for 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses. Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work. AI chatbots present the latest challenge, but venture capitalists say nearly every AI spreadsheet startup they meet builds on top of Excel rather than replacing it.
The software traces its origins to a 1983 Microsoft offsite under the code name Odyssey, where engineers set out to clone Lotus 1-2-3. That program had itself cloned VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet, created by Dan Bricklin for the Apple II in the late 1970s. Bricklin never patented VisiCalc. "Financially it would have been great if we'd have been able to patent it," he told Bloomberg. "And there would be a Bricklin Building at MIT, instead of a Gates Building."
Excel now counts an estimated 500 million paying users. The Pentagon pays for 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses. Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work. AI chatbots present the latest challenge, but venture capitalists say nearly every AI spreadsheet startup they meet builds on top of Excel rather than replacing it.
2 million? (Score:3)
wut? I don't know how this can even be possible. What is going on
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The Department of Defense has millions of military and civilian employees.
They probably aren't even buying as many as they should on bulk licensing and off-internet servers.
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The US armed forces are 2.8 million strong. The DoD employs about million more civilians on top of that. That's not even counting contractors that the DoD may be buying licenses for. 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses doesn't seem that outlandish.
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They're almost certainly paying for O365 licenses, not specific Excel licenses. This includes the Office Suite (Word, PPT, maybe Access, etc. depending on license.) There are probably tiers of licenses assigned, so not one price per user, and there is likely a large volume discount. We don't have enough info to calculate, but the claim that they are paying for "2 million Excel licenses" is likely a bit misleading.
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I assume "the pentagon" includes the over 2 million military personnel who need to access their email
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In May DOGE deactivated more than a HALF MILLION credit cards that were just floating around in Gov't slush drawers that couldn't be attributed to a specific employee, and this was noted as "nearly 10% of all the official credit cards held by the federal govt"...meaning the gov't had 5 MILLION open cc accounts.
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That's DOGE's side of the story. Many employees found out they had to use their personal card for work travel and then file paperwork for reimbursement. That extra paperwork is created and processed on tax-payer's dime.
Cut-first-and-think-later...or quit.
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"use their personal card for work travel and then file paperwork for reimbursement"
Oh no, you mean like 80% of businesses do?
THE HORROR that someone is actually checking this shit off and signing for it.
Oh, and then the person themselves gets the rewards for their travel which is pretty awesome, instead of the organization using some GSG9's ff miles so Hegseth can pinch the stewardii in first class.
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The Pentagon pays for 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses
wut? I don't know how this can even be possible. What is going on
Indeed. Given the number of employees I would have figured it would be an order of magnitude higher than that at least. The Pentagon got an awesome deal.
Meanwhile (Score:4, Informative)
If people want to spend money on something they can get for free - you know what they say about fools and their money.
Re:Meanwhile (Score:5, Interesting)
It's better for you.
It's not better for a lot of businesses. The collaboration features of openoffice are sub-par. That alone excludes openoffice from most shortlists. Many businesses nowadays rely on Sharepoint. Only Google comes close to this.
Excel is by far the best in connecting to external database resources. By far the best in pivot tables. Both are extensively used for financial reporting.
Not saying Excel is perfect. But there simply is no serious competition.
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It's better for you.
It's not better for a lot of businesses. The collaboration features of openoffice are sub-par. That alone excludes openoffice from most shortlists.
Then they are happy, and I am happy for them - they have found their solution. Ten again - If you as a business have zero options. than A Microsoft product, if the very success is predicated on Office 365, without which it all falls apart - you've created a monoculture.
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That was me, too. Excel was absolutely essential to my productivity as a data-slinger, managing real-word data into and back out of largish SQL databases. The ability to just refresh a pivot table from SQL was an automatic one-click updated report, with no code.
I could do a whole bunch of massaging of data from plain text files, notes, cut-and-paste from other applications - or I could do several Excel formulas and maybe a short macro, and process tens of thousands of records into the big database.
It wa
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That was me, too. Excel was absolutely essential to my productivity as a data-slinger, managing real-word data into and back out of largish SQL databases. The ability to just refresh a pivot table from SQL was an automatic one-click updated report, with no code.
I could do a whole bunch of massaging of data from plain text files, notes, cut-and-paste from other applications - or I could do several Excel formulas and maybe a short macro, and process tens of thousands of records into the big database.
It was about far more than "modelling" it was a swiss army knife of data massaging, reformatting, and above all, data-cleaning.
Whenever I get data in excel I cringe. The data will almost always be mangled requiring me to go back to the source and ask them to change their workflow.
Just before Thanksgiving I received a spreadsheet full of serial numbers. The serial numbers with letters in them were fine. The serial numbers that were all numeric all ended with a 0 due to irreversible loss of precision.
Decades ago I loved seeing all the shit people would come up with in excel, access and oracle forms. It let people who do not get p
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Whenever I get data in excel I cringe. The data will almost always be mangled requiring me to go back to the source and ask them to change their workflow.
Just before Thanksgiving I received a spreadsheet full of serial numbers. The serial numbers with letters in them were fine. The serial numbers that were all numeric all ended with a 0 due to irreversible loss of precision.
Decades ago I loved seeing all the shit people would come up with in excel, access and oracle forms. It let people who do not get paid to do this shit get useful value. Everyone else... professionals who should know better than to use excel is an another story entirely.
One time one of our junior accountants came down, asking for some assistance with a presentation. She created her entire presentation in Excel. It was problematic. One that would have been perfect in PowerPoint, and she kinda panicked when I she saw my face. "I'm presenting tomorrow morning to the directorate!"
She was a nice kid, and I liked her, so rather than send her away, which most would have done, we did a tap-dance with her excel file to get screen caps when we could, and regular PowerPoint slides
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That was me, too. Excel was absolutely essential to my productivity as a data-slinger, managing real-word data into and back out of largish SQL databases. The ability to just refresh a pivot table from SQL was an automatic one-click updated report, with no code.
I could do a whole bunch of massaging of data from plain text files, notes, cut-and-paste from other applications - or I could do several Excel formulas and maybe a short macro, and process tens of thousands of records into the big database.
It was about far more than "modelling" it was a swiss army knife of data massaging, reformatting, and above all, data-cleaning.
And, yeah, I've tried to get the same work done in Libre Calc, and it's not even half-way there. It would be great if somebody could pour some real millions into Libre and take away Excel's lunch, but nobody is even talking about it.
Personally, I believe that if you are happy with Microsoft products, and if it is impossible to use anything other than Microsoft, and are the business savvy smart people you are.
How many other aspects of your business that you would fail do you use? Monocultures and single points of failure aer something I always work hard to avoid. Explain how that is smarter than my silly idea of identifying and eliminating SPF's.
I understand that I am the odd man out, and that many believe that monoculture is a g
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Many businesses nowadays rely on Sharepoint [for collaboration].
and while often loathed, it can be very nice to use if you have a custom front end via forms/HTML and 3rd party workflows for automation.
one talented dev is enough for implementation.
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I suspect that is because Microsoft is withholding software libraries and techniques from the open Office team which would very much be in antitrust violation but we don't enforce those laws so that's kind of a moot point.
I cannot imagine what it would be like using OpenOffice for one of those really really huge spreadsheets that are basically poorly implemented da
Re:Meanwhile (Score:4, Insightful)
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I suspect that is because Microsoft is withholding software libraries and techniques from the open Office team which would very much be in antitrust violation
You suspect, eh? Have any of the openoffice or libreoffice developers complained of this? When you say "techniques," do you expect Excel developers to blog about or document every code performance trick they've used? Microsoft's Excel software is proprietary. Keeping the source code non-public is the default position for proprietary code, it isn't some unusual form of withholding. Making better software than opensource competitors isn't anti-competitive. Microsoft isn't obligated to give up whatever secret
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The speed of Excel are due to the core functions being written in finely tuned assembler, or at least they were in the past. It's not a secret. It's just not easily to duplicate in an open source way.
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I suspect that is because Microsoft is withholding software libraries and techniques from the open Office team which would very much be in antitrust violation but we don't enforce those laws so that's kind of a moot point.
How are you so consistently full of it?
As usual, you have no idea what you're talking about.
You've spouted nothing but nonsense for years. Actual years.
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I suspect that is because Microsoft is withholding software libraries and techniques from the open Office team which would very much be in antitrust violation
That is not how antitrust laws work in any place on the planet. And the rest of the places definitely do enforce their laws.
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I cannot imagine what it would be like using OpenOffice for one of those really really huge spreadsheets that are basically poorly implemented databases. And I know we all just want to say don't do that but it fills a need that a lot of businesses have.
It's like accepting the Excelrrors.
Especially when there are relational databases like FileMaker Pro that will accurately save an actual database, and is so flexible, you can output files you can put into Excel, so the Microsoft crowd can be happy, and your data is safe. You can even make it display something that looks like Excel.
The Excel indoctrination and people trying to make it do stuff it wasn't designed to do has me asking people who make an excel presentation to me if they have their data sav
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OpenOffice and LibreOffice were never based on Microsoft code. If it were, since OO/LO are open source, that would make Microsoft's code open source too. Antitrust law does not require businesses to make their code open source. It doesn't even make sense for OO/LO to use Microsoft libraries, because then they would *be* part of MS Office, or at the very least, at the mercy of Microsoft.
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Also I almost laughed at that one: "Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work"... Google apps were excellent for a V1. We've been waiting for a V2 ever since. It is terribly lacking in functionality.
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Also I almost laughed at that one: "Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work"... Google apps were excellent for a V1. We've been waiting for a V2 ever since. It is terribly lacking in functionality.
I tried it once ugh - not ready fro prime time. One of my guys seems to love it, he must have a really low bar. I have people on Windows, Mac and Linux. And Microsoft has no solution for that. Unless things have changed a lot, Windows office doesn't do well when trading files. I remember when people were making posters in Poerpoint, the files they made were on a Windows machine, and PowerPoint assumed that was the size print to use. When we changed it to our large format printer on the Macs, it exploded, n
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office365 on the web - while not perfect - works on all OSes and printing is just about generating a PDF, which you can pring no matter the OS you're using.
Now, sharing files is a pain since you can only collaborate from OneDrive (or SharePoint) with office, but still. It kinda works.
Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. âoe reply.
I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts. As much I hate Excel, I have repeatedly seen the Calc is crappier and especially so on MacOS.
People have different requirements and priorities. And MS Office as a whole is like 60 bucks a year. Well worth it to avoid the catas
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Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. Ãoe reply.
I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts
Excel is dumpster with a hole rusted through the bottom leaving a trail of garbage everywhere it goes.
"A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."
https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com]
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Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. Ãoe reply.
I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts
Excel is dumpster with a hole rusted through the bottom leaving a trail of garbage everywhere it goes.
"A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."
https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com]
I think it might even be more errors in Excel than 1/5th, but I'll go with your cite.
I like a nice spreadsheet - I use them for design applications in electronics. But some of the stuff I've seen bean counters and a few others always evoke the "Hold on a second, something's not right here!" response.
But many people believe that if it is in Excel, it is correct.
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This has nothing to do with Excel but more to do with the fact that there exist at least three different nomenclature schemes for genes followed by the major databases such as ENSEMBL, NCBI RefSeq and UNIPROT. Then there is a "common name" and "official name" and so on.
Automatic data conversion features can be turned off in Excel for years now [postimg.cc](your citation is from 2016).
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Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. âoe reply.
I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts. As much I hate Excel, I have repeatedly seen the Calc is crappier and especially so on MacOS.
People have different requirements and priorities. And MS Office as a whole is like 60 bucks a year. Well worth it to avoid the catastrophe that is Impress. FWIW, Writer seems the least bad component of Libreoffice for my use cases.
You mad bro? You never heard "A fool and his Money are soon parted?
I apologize profusely for introducing humor into a place with humorless people. May you always have to use software you hate.
LANPAR (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I came to say something similar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Ok (Score:1)
So Bricklin would not have gotten a patent, that's all that means. With a 10 year head start LANPAR amounted to nothing because instead of targeting a cheap computer that sold millions of units to just about anyone who saw the need (hence the phrase "killer app" -- you would buy an Apple II or later an IBM PC specifically to run Visicalc) they targeted a mainframe. So if you worked at a company that already had a mainframe, and you could justify the cost to the MIS department getting a terminal (which itsel
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Similar happened for lawsuits over dBASE's IP. With a little digging, a couple of similar languages and systems were found for older bigger computers. There was very little in dBASE that was original. The cloners just used synonyms for commands and key-words.
DOS did similar word-play per CP/M. In the early days of software, almost everyone was a dirty rat-thief, perhaps because patenting software was a legally murky area.
Every firm I've worked at (Score:3)
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But often it ends up the wrong tool for the job, used like a database or application. When the person who made the spaghetti-sheets leaves, everyone is left scratching their heads.
MS-Access would be a better fit, but it's often frowned upon because amateurs have also damaged its reputation. It's possible to write maintenance-friendly apps with MS-Access, it's just not tuned that way out of the box, and "maintain-ifying" an app is not taught.
(Web equivalents of MS-Access so far suck. The web ruins every CRUD
I only use Excel (Score:1)
because I'm old and not cool. All the cool kids are using VisiCalc.
I use Excel more then any other tool (Score:2)
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Bingo.
I asked a friend who started enthusiastically using AI for coding, used it happily for various business bits of writing, summaries, etc.
So I asked him if he had to give up one tool: "AI" (all of them) or "The spreadsheet", he thought for about 10 seconds and said, "AI" for sure: you're in and out of Excel all day long.
Re: I use Excel more then any other tool (Score:2)
Oh great! (Score:2)
The Pentagon pays for 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses.
Because having all that day-to-day military data in the cloud, managed by a private-sector company whose primary business is data-rape, is a sterling choice for managing national security. Srsly, WTF?
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Some country in Europe started migrating their defense operations to Libreoffice for this reason. Possibly Germany.
Libre Office (Score:3)
Re:Oh great! (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Excel did kill Multiplan (Score:2)
Good product (Score:2)
One of the view pieces of software I have that almost never crashes and almost always does what I want.
One of the core applications I require on a computer to be minimally useful . The others being a mail client, a web browse and a word processor.
Want MS Office Dead? Donate to LibrieOffice : ) (Score:3)
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After years of development, the LibreOffice people haven't realized that the only way to beat Office is to become Office. LibreCalc should seek to be as close to a pixel perfect clone of Excel as possible. Like it or not, Excel is essentially the POSIX standard for spreadsheets, and building anything that doesn't follow that standard will always be third tier.
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A few billion here, a few billion there, and soon you're talking about some real money. Yes, MS has invested billions. It would take billions to catch up. Specifically, the collaboration features set MS apart from LibreOffice. Those are WHY MS is king. If it were as easy as being able to open and edit spreadsheets, MS would have lost the war long ago.
But thanks to Copilot... (Score:3)
But thanks to the addition of Copilot, Microsoft is doing their best to kill it.
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I would argue that Copilot in Excel is an ideal use for AI. Excel's function syntax is arcane and difficult to write for anything nontrivial. Pivot tables are a challenge even for many advanced users. Copilot actually does do a good job of helping people navigate the complexity, not unlike how it does a good job generating code in "real" programming languages.
Nobody has killed the hammer (Score:2)
so there are tools that don't need changing. Software needs to get a clue on that.
"Kill" excel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell me you don't do actual work without outright saying it.
The kind of people who are wanting/trying/thinking about killing excel are, in my view the same people who believe the same thing about email, and think you can do useful ongoing work communication on teams or other shit-chat platforms.
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Deep features keep legacy software going (Score:2)
Just a few weeks ago there was a slashdot post via the Reigster giving a good clue as to why people still pay for it versus LibreOffice/OpenOffice versions or Google Sheets:
"Finance, for example, still relies on Excel [theregister.com] because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register."
You might say
Never learned Excel and never will (Score:2)
45 year old executive with 25 year career in software development. Have never learned Excel, and never will. Give me plain old SQL any day.
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Avoid Excel, install LibreOffice Calc.
Re: Never learned Excel and never will (Score:2)
Libreoffice is the same junk, different pile. It uses the same junky language.
I have no interest in learning the hack excel equation syntax.
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You probably should familiarize yourself with or, if you have an allergy to Microsoft, OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc. It's a good general purpose data manipulation tool. There are things it does badly, but other things that are better than anything else in its class.
I definitely wouldn't brag about not knowing it, that's like boasting you've never used a personal computer.
Re: Never learned Excel and never will (Score:2)
The same shitty language is used. No thanks. Spreadsheets are garbage.
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You are precisely the kind of executive who needs strict security on their database access. Knows just enough to be dangerous, don't know where the land mines are.
Excel runs the world (Score:1)
There is a surprising amount of information that is stored in Excel sheets. Most governments, business, universities, etc run on Excel. It's also something Microsoft hasn't broken.
Funny thing word sucks balls. Word is worse than 25 year old competitors such as Word Perfect, but because it is bundled with Excel, Word has became the default word processor for most people.
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So true. I think Excel is the only Microsoft product that is any good at all. Everything else is total garbage. It's a shame no one has just made a true clone of it. Not a sort of copy with different shortcuts, formulas and menu layouts, but a true clone.
Agree, it's a pretty good hammer (Score:1)
I like Excel. It pretty much works. Sure, a lot of people use it for things it wasn't designed for, but you cannot blame Excel for that. Personally, the Solver is a favourite of mine. I'm sure I use it in all kinds of statistically indefensible ways.
Pound for pound, the best component of MS office, and has been for decades.
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Excel is the ultimate "do everything" tool, when you don't have the time or expertise to engineer a process properly. It's great for prototyping a process. Whenever I see a spreadsheet being used to manage a process, I think to myself, "There is a process waiting to be automated."
Spreadsheets are brilliant and risky (Score:2)
When I 1st used a spreadsheet, I was studying engineering. I was doing something like https://www.omnicalculator.com... [omnicalculator.com]
It took 60 seconds to enter all the numbers on a calculator. I needed to iterate over it to find the right material/diameter/etc. I could have written a program in BASIC or Fortran. Then I'd need to think about input, output, loading/saving a file.
A spreadsheet let me change 1 number and iterate. I didn't have to program anything except the formula. I wasn't even doing muliple lines!