How Microsoft Excel Conquered Corporate America

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2:26This week in Las Vegas, a group of elite players faced off to compete for a coveted world championship title.

2:38It really does feel like you're, you know, at Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks starting five run out.

2:47With a little bit less excitement, maybe. The competitors enter the arena through a tunnel, pro-sports style. Everybody runs out to cheers, you know, befitting their celebrity and skill in the world of spreadsheets.

3:09Yep, that's right. We're talking about the world championship of Microsoft Excel. Dina Bass, who's covered Microsoft for decades and now writes about AI, says since the first competition in 2012, Microsoft excelling has become something of a serious esport. All right, audience, we're going to need your help. We're going to count it down. We're going to start at five. Let's go. It even has commentators. Four, three, two, one. Have you ever seen like video games speed running where people try to finish like a Mario game as quickly as possible? That also has that like play-by-play commentary because otherwise like normal people wouldn't understand what's going on.

3:51They sort of give them something to solve and you're watching it, but it moves so quickly you kind of don't know what you're watching. The right side of the screen as well, if you're wondering what's flashing on the right side there, those are his keys and his shortcuts. So obviously at this level. What you're watching these pro-spreadsheeters do isn't too different from what millions of office workers around the country do every day. Sit at a computer and put numbers into cells. The genesis of this competition was financial modeling. That's Max Chafkin, who writes for Businessweek and co-hosts the magazine's podcast, Everybody's Business.

4:27So it used to be a competition to see who was the best at financial modeling, which is, of course, how most people use Microsoft Excel. And they changed it a couple years back to make it more accessible. So now what they model are games. But at the end of the day, viewers are like looking at a spreadsheet, like a normal Excel spreadsheet. And there's like a little mini screen inside, like an inset screen, like on a video game where you see the athlete, you know, clicking the mouse and manipulating the cells. It's not exactly an NBA game. But watch an Excel wizard input functions at warp speed and your pulse might start racing.

5:07Which is not the kind of emotion people usually associate with Excel. Somehow, despite its association with badly lit offices and boring capitalist grunt work, Excel has become one of the most influential computer programs in the world. And not just in the world of esports. Excel is like the most, I think it's like probably the most important piece of software that has ever been created. Basically, like, it runs almost every single business. It runs every single nonprofit. It runs like any big organization you can think about is in some sense operating on Microsoft Excel because it's the dominant spreadsheet platform.

5:53I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Microsoft Excel is now 40 years old. In an age of AI and Google Sheets, can it last another 40?

6:10For many people, Microsoft Excel's classic green and white grid and its seemingly infinite scroll of columns and rows bring up strong feelings. How do you feel about Microsoft Excel? I love using it. This is something our producer David Fox discovered walking around New York City's Bryant Park during a lunch break. Do you have a favorite Excel formula or function? Oh my gosh. I mean, it's really basic, but I love a count if or a count a. X lookup. H-E-A is a good one. I use a lot of if and statements. I like being able to copy things, you know, when you just drag the cursor down. I mean, if you're really a pro, you don't use the mouse, but I will use the mouse just for efficiency.

6:54Bloomberg's Dina Bass and Max Chafkin say those kinds of reactions are pretty typical. Excel just symbolizes drudgery, right? It's every workplace movie stereotype. You know, it's the office in Slough. It's office space in your nine bosses. The user interface is dull. It hasn't really changed much. It's also, and this was suggested to me by Mish Kapoor, who's a spreadsheet pioneer, but it's also an embodiment of the things that we hate most about capitalism, right? Like Excel is about cutting costs. It's about optimizing. If you get laid off, like guaranteed you were laid off because of a sell on an Excel spreadsheet.

7:39And I think we all like kind of understand that. It's like the unfun parts of capitalism. Right. Like we're all just numbers in an Excel file at the end of the day. I mean, I think for many people, including many power users, it's like it is like a thing that they hate and a thing that they also appreciate. The thing for me that kind of epitomized this, there's a very active community on Reddit for Excel. The most popular post of all time is somebody explaining how to watch WALL-E inside of Microsoft Excel in order to trick their company's workplace software into thinking that they're using Excel when they're, in fact, watching a movie.

8:22So they're on Excel for like an hour and 45 minutes, but they're just watching WALL-E. I love it because it totally epitomizes, first of all, this software is insanely powerful. Like, you can add up numbers, but you can also run full-on programs. And yet, like, with all of that power, what you're doing is getting around the fact that you have to use the software in the first place. There are something like 500 million paying Excel users out there, according to Max and Dina's calculations, based on Microsoft's public disclosures. Those users range from Excel social media influencers to employees at the U.S.

8:57Department of War. Finance guys, college students, and people like Steve Ballmer. Most people think it's pretty weird. I keep a spreadsheet of how I spend my hours. When we interviewed Steve Ballmer, he was like, oh, yeah, I mean, like, I'm not really an Excel guy. And then he showed us all these, like, all these insane ways that he was using it. Steve Ballmer headed Microsoft Sales in the 80s and went on to become the company's CEO. He now owns the Los Angeles Clippers. OK, can you guys see that? Oh, my God. He showed Max and Dina the Excel spreadsheet he uses to organize his life. So this is kind of my spreadsheet.

9:3725 budget, 2025 actual, year to date. How many nights am I away from home? What nights were they? I've known Steve Ballmer for more than two decades. His entire brain is just a series of endless spreadsheets. That's the way he thinks. I, of course, asked him, like, where's the bathroom time go? He's like, oh, that's personal time. Everything 9 to 5 I keep track of and anything clippers at night. Extreme as it may be, Balmer's spreadsheet habit speaks to how Excel has morphed from a computational tool to a ubiquitous part of people's everyday lives. But how did the digital spreadsheet revolution start?

10:21Mac says it begins in the 1970s, not with Microsoft or Excel, but with a program called Visicalc. We spoke to the inventor of Visicalc, this guy named Dan Bricklin, who dreamed it up while he was in a business school class. There are things that look like spreadsheets, you know, from ancient Mesopotamia. But like he was like, wouldn't it be great if you could have one of these tables with numbers where it just calculates instantly? And he created with a co-founder, Bob Frankston, basically this kind of rough-hewn spreadsheet called VisiCalc for the Apple II. It really was, I think, the thing that started the personal computing revolution.

11:05At the time, computers were mostly used by universities or large companies. They weren't in lots of people's homes or in most people's desks at work. But big technology companies like Microsoft were hoping to change that. Microsoft's, like, early motto was, you know, a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software. But the problem is you have to convince people that they want this. Why would anybody want their own one of these things? Microsoft realized that spreadsheet software could be part of that pitch for selling more personal computers. So they decided to take what Visicalc pioneered and iterate on it.

11:47They started working on a digital spreadsheet competitor. Was there a moment when Microsoft kind of realized this could be a really big deal for them as a company? I mean, they knew from the jump. By the time the Excel project started in 83, which was originally called Project Odyssey, spreadsheets were a thing. Like, everyone knew that there were basically, like, two cool things you could do with a computer. One was word processing, like desktop publishing, and the other is spreadsheets. So Microsoft's frantically trying to make their own spreadsheet, and they made this original one, which was like a VisiCalc knockoff called Multiplan that did not work out.

12:29And then they started working on another knockoff, which was a Lotus knockoff, Lotus being at the time the most successful spreadsheet program. And they made this decision, which I think in retrospect, it looks inspired to put it on the Mac. And not only did that help like propel the Mac, it also ends up propelling Microsoft because spreadsheets using this kind of graphical interface, the point and click thing. It's just like a way more elegant version of the experience. And that then sort of propels Excel to become the dominant spreadsheet platform. And then that gets juiced by like a ton of sort of Microsoft, you know, hard-nosed business behavior.

13:16One of the key business strategies was selling subscriptions to several of their software apps together as a package. That package was called Microsoft Office. I think if you're trying to understand, like, how did Microsoft sort of use Excel to propel itself to this dominance? Like in one word, it's bundling. As Microsoft evolved into the 90s, they start making all these deals with big companies and with computer manufacturers. So it becomes this like thing where you can't really switch your spreadsheet without making a bunch of other changes that could be potentially disruptive to your business.

13:53The bundle got even bigger sort of in the cloud era because ultimately Microsoft winds up doing this, you know, cloud license offering where if you're a corporation, every employee gets everything in one thing. It ends up becoming, it ends up being called Microsoft 365. And you can't take those pieces apart. And look, I had a CIO tell me while I was researching a different story about a year ago that his CEO was trying to figure out how they could save money on software and came over to him and said, look, you know, I personally don't use Excel. Can you go to Microsoft and you can save some money on my license?

14:30I don't need Excel. Don't pay them for Excel for me. And the CIO just looked at his CEO like you sweet summer child. That is not a thing. With the benefit of hindsight, how important was Excel in turning Microsoft into the company that it is today? I mean, I think there's no Microsoft, the four trillion, almost four trillion dollar, you know, market cap company that like dominates the business software market without Excel. In four decades, Excel has managed to conquer the corporate world and seep into our culture. But it's no longer the only game in town. The challenges to Excel's dominance? That's coming up next.

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17:40When Microsoft Excel was first released in 1985, it built on the work of early digital spreadsheet programs. like VisiCalc and Lotus. And pretty much since then, Excel has been synonymous with spreadsheets. But Bloomberg's Dina Bass says that hasn't stopped other companies from trying to compete with it, like Google, which introduced Google Sheets in 2006. Several people we spoke to, including Ray Ozzie, who after his time at Lotus actually ended up at Microsoft working on their cloud strategy, said to us, look, people thought, We thought Sheets was going to, and just Google's Office competitors in general, were going to be the thing that took out Excel, but it just never really happened.

18:27And look, I mean, Google does have a number of their Office competitor is particularly strong in schools. You know, most kids, when they go to school, they get a Chromebook, and it comes with the Google applications. And so you end up with a generation of people that are growing up not using Office, but instead using the Google rivals. And so there has been this question, I think, for the last 10 years or so about what would happen when those folks hit the workforce. But we're still really not seeing a mass migration away from office. It seems like when you hit the workforce, you get assigned your office license.

19:02So far, Excel has managed to fend off its free cloud-based competitor. But now it's also confronting another big technological shift. I have to ask, what about AI? What kind of threat does AI pose to Excel? So if you think like at the furthest remove, the promise of AI is it's going to take a large amount of data, of information, and allow you to ask questions of it and get answers in an easy way. And that's like what a spreadsheet does. And so there are lots of potential Excel competitors. There are sort of like AI versions of Excel. There are these kind of like AI tools that are designed essentially to work with Excel.

19:42But like part of the problem is that these AI tools are really just either copycats of Excel. Like they're sort of just like doing exactly what Excel does or they're just little pieces that are designed to work with Excel. So it's like an AI assistant that will spit out a spreadsheet, but that spreadsheet ends up being an Excel file. But then there's another issue with AI, which is like AI is not great at math. Like just like the most basic Excel function is like some. Like, add up a big, long list of numbers. And, like, large language models are not awesome at computation because, like, they're going for approximation, not the perfect answer.

20:23And then the other thing is AI models are really bad at, like, at telling you why they arrived at a given answer. And that is a thing that spreadsheets are awesome at. And Dina says that even some of the AI products that are aiming to replace Excel still rely on spreadsheets to manage their data. What people are trying to do is not reinvent the underlying spreadsheet layer. It's, you know, basically create a copilot or an assistant that works on top of the data in the spreadsheet and answers questions for you. Now, Microsoft, of course, is trying to do the same thing with their copilot. And so even if you're using an AI algorithm to generate a spreadsheet, my guess is it's going to spit it out and you're going to be right back in Microsoft Excel, just like your parents and maybe even your grandparents were.

21:12Mac says there might be something deeper at play here, something intangible that's kept people coming back to Excel year after year. Maybe there is something fundamental to a spreadsheet that like we wouldn't actually want to process data in another way that like really this is just like a table of numbers. Like I said, people have been using tables of numbers for a very long time. Yeah, if it was good enough for Mesopotamia. Yeah, it's like it's how Steve Ballmer's brain works. Maybe it's how all of our brains work in some sense. And like the prospect of trying to reinvent that, it doesn't make that much sense, which is why, like Dina said, like Microsoft strategy is not to make an AI version of Excel.

21:52It's just to have like an assistant inside of Excel that – and this is, you know, barring the language that Microsoft executives use when they talk about it. But it's basically like they want to make you as good as the world champion. Three, two, one. And we're done. All right. Wow. Wow. So you watch those world champions on TV. You're really impressed. You're thrilled. A huge congratulations to our 2025 Microsoft Excel world champion, Dermot Early. And now you, with the help of Copilot, can do the same kinds of advanced modeling that they do. I don't think it's quite there yet, but that's the promise.

22:37This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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