Excel Never Dies

Like Excel, these products are simple enough that non-technical people can use them, but flexible enough that users will create with them in ways that the product’s creators can’t anticipate.

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today. Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone.

Excel is the most popular programming language on earth, and most people who program in Excel don’t even realize they are, in fact, programming. There are an estimated 1.2 billion people who use Microsoft Office, and while it’s hard to know exactly how many people use Excel regularly, estimates put it at 750 million users. By comparison, as of 2018... See more

Most software we use at work exists in one of two categories:

1. It’s new and we love it for now.


2. It’s old but we have to use it and we hate it.

Unfortunately, Excel lets you do all kinds of complicated transformations of data, and yet lacks any sort of history of the sequence of those computations. The ability to copy and paste data into a tab that serves as a database means that any steps leading up to the pasted data are lost.

Excel is very hard to version and compare changes. While code is intimidating in many respects, the fact that it is saved as text makes it very easy to version and compare changes from one version to another.

Excel combines the power of a programming language, the immediate usability of consumer software, and the skill progression of a video game with the flexibility to adapt to nearly infinite use cases. That’s a combination no other software offers, and it’s why Excel has been able to survive and thrive while millions of other applications have come a... See more

Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve p... See more

If there is a core product design lesson to learn from Excel, it’s that combining usability with flexibility is both incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding.