Despite its advancing years, Microsoft Excel is proving a hit with young finance professionals, many of whom reckon the aging number-cruncher has a bright future.
According to a Datarails report, more than half (54 percent) of 22 to 32-year-old finance professionals say they outright "love" Excel, up from 39 percent among the older generation.
We're not sure if that says more about finance professionals than it does about Excel.
Eighty-nine percent said Excel would remain as - or more - important in the next decade, while 78 percent claimed they would be less than keen on a job that banned the number-crunching software.
Some 94 percent of users over 51 expect to get their spreadsheet kicks from the application over the next decade, and 96 percent claimed they were likely to decline a job in which they couldnt use it.
Music to Microsoft's ears, perhaps, but not great news for Google Sheets. Then again, the two are different beasts. Sheets is cloud-first and geared for collaboration, while Excel is snappier (depending on local hardware) and loaded with more features.
Aviation giant Airbus, for example, has found Excel a hard habit to break, citing file size as a factor that have kept its finance team (among others) clinging to the veteran software.
"Different generations in a department tend not to agree on much, but Excel is something that unites everyone in the finance department, from Gen Z to Boomers," said Didi Gurfinkel, co-founder and CEO of Datarails.
Gurfinkel has an interest in the popularity of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool. Datarails sells an Excel-native financial planning and analysis platform with some AI stirred in. The company was also a sponsor of the half-time show for the recent Microsoft Excel World Championship (MEWC).
That said, the existence of events like MEWC demonstrates the affection some have for the productivity tool, which was first released before many of its users were born.
Of the finance pros surveyed in the UK and the US, only 5 percent expressed purely negative sentiment toward Excel.
Excel itself first emerged in 1985 in a market that was dominated first by VisiCalc on the Apple II and, later, by Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft had made an earlier attempt at cracking the spreadsheet nut with Multiplan, but it is Excel that stood the test of time.
Microsoft is adding AI functionality to Excel, which has been welcomed by the winner of the 2025 Excel World Championship. However, it will need to tread carefully. While "82 percent of those surveyed have high or moderate emotional attachment to Excel," it would be all too easy to flip that figure should Copilot start interfering with spreadsheet skills built over years or decades.
Who would have thought that pivot tables and conditional formatting are the core features that bridge the generational gap. ®
Source: The register