Excel is about to get sexy again: here’s why

This autumn in the US, Excel will be 30 years old. It’s difficult to imagine a business world without the spreadsheet, which first appeared as VisiCalc on the Apple II in 1979. Excel’s birthday came six years later. Since then it has become the world’s most widely used spreadsheet software programme. More than 1.2 billion people (one in every seven on the planet) use Office today, of which Excel is a key package.

Excel is often considered the ugly stepsister of Business Intelligence (BI). But, that’s no longer true. It’s all grown up and a long way from the old spreadsheet application you used to know from the 1990s.

Excel now comes with a number of more advanced (but lesser known) features that help business users quickly answer the questions that are important to them and save hours in preparing and producing template-driven results with powerful dashboard capability.

Excel’s sex appeal lies in its removing many of the technical limitations that used to frustrate users. Versions of Excel up to 7.0 could only handle 16,384 rows whereas Version 12.0 worksheets could have 1 048 576 rows. But, people’s data needs are already far beyond that. With the Powerpivot capability that came as a plugin with Excel 2010 you can easily go to several millions of rows. That’s big data.

From a geek point of view you can now really get into the data and start doing some smart analytics and data discovery.

The visualisations that go with Excel are also improving, but a big change is the next-generation PowerBI plugin launched in July and its ability to introduce your own visualisations. If you have the team and skill you can now have your own visualisations and incorporate that into PowerBI so it becomes a platform for your business rather than a tool.

Excel 2016 will come with built-in functionality that makes it even easier to find and bring data into one place for modelling, which could remove the need for multiple workbooks.

For example, finance teams often have one workbook for each month. Comparing results by keeping two workbooks open together becomes quite complicated. Using slices to get data out fairly quickly and building a pivot table to have the data side by side can make things much easier. Having information in a repeatable update capability (the one-button refresh) instead of updating it manually is also far more efficient. (Pretty hot right!)

This time saving frees people up to focus on the job they really want to do – analysing data, rather than building up the data tool. Instead of just trying to get the job done and using the same old process all the time, it also let’s you see the business with fresh eyes and say what can we do differently, how can we innovate, where are the opportunities?

As businesses grow, Excel’s family of BI tools can support them wherever they are in the analytics journey – whether all they need is Native Excel to run basic calculations; PowerPivot and PowerQuery to do data modelling, cleansing and aggregation of data from different business systems; or PowerBI with the power of dashboards and the cloud.

So what’s the outlook for Excel after 30 years? Are its days numbered?

Your favourite spreadsheet isn’t going anywhere. With self-service analytics and report automation Excel is creating new ways for people to turn data into information. Expect Excel to stay on your desktop – albeit with an evolving focus on BI. Personally, I think it’s ageing beautifully.