Excel is the pinnacle of user space applications. I wonder if there will ever be a tool—physical or otherwise—that has a higher combination of (utility * approachability).
Excel is used by middle-schoolers and post-doc graduates. You can run any kind of businesses in excel. You could go to space using excel. You can make art in excel. You can make a CPU in excel. You could write a book in excel (maybe that’s a stretch, but I guarantee it’s been done)
Or are maybe they mean everyone is abandoning excel after they failed to patch out the cheeses and tried to attract the party gamers by breaking the meta with xlookup?
This is really two articles in one. First a (great) history of the spreadsheet.
Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.
What makes companies special? They're state machines. Reality is a collection of systems of records, events and processes. Companies are special due to their people and their judgement and timing, and the data they have access to and what permissions they have to do things. And marketing? What else?
Absolutely. And the data and code being stored all in one file makes it exceptionally nimble for the planning phase. You can generally count on any stakeholder in your org being able to handle it.
This looks really good. Haven't read in full yet, but I was hoping to see him credit Ben Evans's "Office, messaging and verbs" (2015): "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person."
Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people?
Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.
I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]
This has interesting speculation on the future business impact of AI, extrapolated from Excel:
"This will be genuinely extraordinary for what organizations, particularly the best organizations, can achieve. But if each previous ideology of the corporation illuminated something real about its character and potential, each also, in the fullness of time, deformed it. The financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified; and the AI ideology, I suspect, will be blind to what cannot be made legible as a workflow."
The rich and complex history of spreadsheets inspired me to build React Spreadsheet. Along the way I deepened (and others) understanding of the complexities and intricacies of spreadsheets https://iddan.github.io/react-spreadsheet
> And yet you will struggle to find people who love the spreadsheet.
who doesn't love spreadsheets? the average corporate employee holds a death grip on google sheets even if you spend $1m on software that theoretically should keep them out of it.
i've seen countless instances across engineering/data, product, marketing, and recruiting where data is smuggled out of an HRIS/ATS/CRM/ERP to create static structure, improved personal tracking, note-taking, data analysis, realtime team collaboration, etc. all wrapped up in a mini database.
Really do think that spreadsheets are the most optimal way to coordinate agents.
Each row spins up a parallel agent, columns mapped as input, agent executes and writes new columns as output.
We tried initial implementation of this with rtrvr.ai building out Sheets Workflows, but I can't help but feel that there is a thread we're pulling towards a deeper insight on this
I wrote my first AI agent (well a backpropagation model, LOL) in Excel on Mac in 1988. It could only handle several thousand parameters. But it was very cool to see the model in operation.
the "financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified" line is the whole essay in one sentence. worked at a startup that got acquired by PE and watched them reduce every relationship and piece of institutional knowledge into a cell in a model. six months later the people who actually knew why things were done a certain way had all left.
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> But you will be hard-pressed to find a true admirer of Excel.
It’s a keyword search away. There are many, and they love Excel. How did you not find them?
https://excel-esports.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modeling_World_Cup
https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/15r53rc/why_i_unapol...
Excel is used by middle-schoolers and post-doc graduates. You can run any kind of businesses in excel. You could go to space using excel. You can make art in excel. You can make a CPU in excel. You could write a book in excel (maybe that’s a stretch, but I guarantee it’s been done)
I know, because that's what I did!
Or are maybe they mean everyone is abandoning excel after they failed to patch out the cheeses and tried to attract the party gamers by breaking the meta with xlookup?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.
There is no other planning tool in the software industry that can answer “what if I changed that” as seamlessly as excel.
Planning is not about its absolute numbers but about its sensitivity to inputs and assumptions.
A single spreadsheet used locally is probably the best imaginable tool for answering "what if I changed that."
That same sheet shared across an organization suddenly becomes a game of "what caused that change."
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/
"This will be genuinely extraordinary for what organizations, particularly the best organizations, can achieve. But if each previous ideology of the corporation illuminated something real about its character and potential, each also, in the fullness of time, deformed it. The financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified; and the AI ideology, I suspect, will be blind to what cannot be made legible as a workflow."
> And yet you will struggle to find people who love the spreadsheet.
who doesn't love spreadsheets? the average corporate employee holds a death grip on google sheets even if you spend $1m on software that theoretically should keep them out of it.
i've seen countless instances across engineering/data, product, marketing, and recruiting where data is smuggled out of an HRIS/ATS/CRM/ERP to create static structure, improved personal tracking, note-taking, data analysis, realtime team collaboration, etc. all wrapped up in a mini database.
Each row spins up a parallel agent, columns mapped as input, agent executes and writes new columns as output.
We tried initial implementation of this with rtrvr.ai building out Sheets Workflows, but I can't help but feel that there is a thread we're pulling towards a deeper insight on this
I have some reason to believe my team was the first within Apple SQA to lean heavily into that, but I’d love to hear of earlier examples.