The End of Excel?

You could squander a good career, trying to compete with Excel. You might as well take up tilting at windmills, or so went the conventional wisdom.

Sun Microsystems’s OpenOffice tried to win hearts for over two decades, convincing governments and universities to switch and escape paying for Microsoft Office, but there was always a sticking spot: Excel. 

The University of Toronto tried to switch in 2005 but failed to get everyone on board because Excel supported double as many rows per spreadsheet—and because its students depended on the third-party Solver add-on, an analytics and data modeling tool ubiquitous in statistics classes that was only supported on Excel. Two years later, Belgium’s Federal Public Service also tried and failed to switch office suites. A better ecosystem, along with existing Excel users’ “resistance to change,” scuttled it.

Features and integrations had, over the years since Excel was first bundled into Microsoft Office in 1988, built what seemed an insurmountable moat around the world’s most popular spreadsheet app, as each iteration added more functions and features. You’d consider writing somewhere other than Word; it's possible that presentations, you could imagine, might not require PowerPoint. There was a good chance you’d never used OneNote at all. Excel—that was what kept businesses buying Office. Even on Hacker News, Excel garners praise whenever it comes up.

“Excel is straight up [sic] a good tool,” wrote @screye in a discussion about alternatives. “Fighting Excel is like waging the Drug War,” chimed in @ianphughes. “You can make what appear to be gains while still losing.”

But over the past decade, alternative spreadsheet apps seem to be making solid gains. There’s a spreadsheet built into everything these days. There’s one in Quip, a simpler office suite founded in 2012 and acquired by Salesforce for $750 million in 2016—the same year that Notion was founded. Notion is a notes app growing fast enough to have raised over $343 million—and its tables, a cross between a database and a spreadsheet, are another tool chipping away at Excel’s dominance. Coda, another notes app that launched in 2014 and has raised $240 million so far, went so far as to liberate spreadsheet functions—like calculating an average—from the sheet and put them in your prose. Airtable, the database app, is more Microsoft Access-meets-2022 than Excel, yet it, too, is taking over tasks many previously would have been relegated to a spreadsheet.

And those are the big players. There are newer spreadsheet apps that have together raised over $57 million in funding: Rows launched in 2016 to automate spreadsheets, Casual in 2012 focused on financial planning spreadsheets, Actiondesk in 2018 to put live data in spreadsheets, and Grid the same year to simplify visualizing spreadsheet data. And lest we forget, Google Sheets and Smartsheet have already managed to survive—thrive, even—for a decade and a half, the former as a core part of Google Workspace, the latter with a $4.4 billion market cap.

It’s like the spreadsheet became generic, as if Excel taught us a new language that we now speak even when using other software.