Excel, Turning 40, Still Has Its Fan Base
Finance executives weigh in on the spreadsheet program’s enduring popularity and future challenges.
Some swear by it. Others want to get rid of it. When it comes to Excel, everyone has an opinion.
Tracking changes
Some swear by it. Others want to get rid of it.
When it comes to Excel, everyone has an opinion.
Microsoft’s spreadsheet software program turns 40 this September.
Even as it approaches middle age, Excel still has a hold on finance departments around the world, and is widely used for data analysis, modeling and budgeting, alongside numerous other tasks.
But the next 40 years may be harder to navigate.
Finance professionals laud the program’s flexibility and ability to track changes as key reasons for Excel’s enduring popularity and market share.
Now, though, more tools are coming along that automate tasks and require fewer manual data entry.
That raises the question: Will the advance of AI be the death of Excel?
Conversations with a number of finance executives in the past week revealed that while they don’t see Excel being sidelined anytime soon, many welcome the shift to new technologies.
Microsoft’s Excel turns 40 this September.
“I hope, at a minimum, that AI starts to do the ‘Excels’ for everybody,” said Jamie Miller, the CFO of payments giant PayPal. Miller, who previously served as the CFO of industrial conglomerate GE and agri-foods business Cargill, said she occasionally uses Excel for tracking progress, strategic modeling and capital planning – but, much less so than she did 10 years ago.
At Cardinal Health, a distributor of drugs and medical products, CFO Aaron Alt is encouraging his team to use AI to analyze big data and interpret numbers, instead of relying on Excel. “I want my team to be talking about why the numbers are what they are, and what we should do about it, and not spending their time trying to figure out what the numbers are,” Alt said.
In the trenches of corporate finance however, Excel maintains a loyal following. Some in the rank-and-file flag the lack of traceability in AI, as well as concerns around reliability, at least at this stage. Hallucinations, which occur when AI fabricates facts and figures, also worry finance workers.
“AI in my experience hasn’t been able to adequately explain, whether it’s because of hallucinations or because it can’t tell you how it weighs different factors,” said Taylor Otstot, vice president of finance at Dashlane, a software firm. “It lacks that explainability factor.”
Otstot, who previously worked for GoDaddy, uses Excel “for pretty much everything.” All budgeting, forecasting and analysis usually starts in Excel, he said. “It really comes down to the flexibility to craft it to whatever situation we are facing.”
Jason Hershman, who serves as CFO for a number of sports businesses, views Excel’s ubiquity as one of its advantages. “At the end of the day, someone always says, ‘Send me the Excel, show me the formulas in Excel,’” he said, adding that investors continue to request financial projections and models using the program’s spreadsheets.
Interestingly, mentions of Excel proficiency in finance job listings actually increased this year, with 84% of roles in financial planning and analysis requiring it, compared to 66% a year earlier, according to an analysis of 6,000 postings by software firm Datarails.
Tech firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Tesla continue to demand Excel skills, Datarails found.
Microsoft in a statement said the program is utilized “more today than ever before, with usage growing every month for the past six years,” and pointed to over 400 million users.
Still, the tool has its weaknesses, for example around collaboration between several users. “That’s the biggest issue that we are seeing as accountants,” said Bill Hanna, a director of finance at a startup in New York.
Otstot points to additional issues such as accuracy control, especially in the case of models that have thousands of rows.
In recent years, software companies have developed a range of extensions to address some of Excel’s limitations.
Microsoft’s own AI tool, Copilot, for example, can process natural language queries and assist users in building models directly within Excel.
“Using human language in Excel and the ability for AI to do some of the thinking for me allows me to spend time on reviewing the model,” Hanna said. That also has an impact on headcount: “Instead of having six or seven people on my team, we are doing the same things with three individuals.”
At the end of day, we might be witnessing more of an evolution, with the use of Excel potentially declining once AI tools become more reliable.
Still, it will probably never truly vanish.
Cardinal Health’s Alt recalled a recent conversation with his son, a college sophomore, who is learning to use Excel. “I was giving him the tricks and the tips,” he said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get away from Excel.”
Perhaps the mid-life crisis can wait.
(Article: Excel, Turning 40, Still Has Its Fan Base – Bloomberg)
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