Microsoft Excel: The Most Valuable Software of All Time
An informal survey of marketing and PR professionals who work with social media asked the following question:
What is the one tool you can’t live without?
Do you think the answer was TweetDeck or an iPhone or the latest and greatest sentiment-reputation analytics package?
Think again. The answer: Microsoft Excel.
If you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Excel is like Playdoh—it can be used for anything. It’s powerful and malleable at same time.
It’s the perfect tool for the long tail…for all the little niche parts of business that aren’t big enough to have their own specialized tool. Likewise, it’s the perfect tool for emerging industries that have not stabilized to the point where suitable tools can be built.
Excel is the MacGuyver of software.
My view is that Excel is the single most valuable software application in the history of software.
Is it more valuable than e-mail? Well, before e-mail we still had means of written communication. Email simply made it faster.
Is it more valuable than a word processor? Well, before word processors we still had typewriters. Word processors simply made drafting documents easier.
On the other hand, Excel gives us the power to do things we couldn’t do before. In an instant, Excel can do calculations that would have taken a team of mathematicians to do in the past. In an instant, it can do calculations that would have been prohibitively expensive for even a team of math whizzes to do…calculations that would have taken them years. And, in an instant, you can tweak one number and it will do all of them again.
Just think about that power!!
But, aren’t there other software applications that have empowered people to do things that couldn’t be done before? Yes, I’m sure there are, but here’s what pushes Excel over the top: this power is given to the masses. For a few hundred bucks, you can have this power and it takes barely any specialized skill to perform these calculations.
My goodness, Excel is a marvel!!
[...] comments After my deification of Microsoft Excel, I was thinking that there is one feature I wish Excel had that it doesn’t. Note: this is a [...]
Microsoft Excel: Feature Request at Scott Porad
4 Mar 10 at 9:10 am
As one of the original Excel developers, THANKS! But, to be fair, we followed in the steps of giants. All of the properties you love about Excel were also present in VisiCalc, and then Lotus 123.
But, we did a damn fine implementation of a powerful and easy to use spreadsheet (if I do say so, myself). And Lotus dropped the ball and took too long to make credible Windows or Mac versions of their product.
I actually use Google Spreadsheets more today than I do Excel. While Excel is still more powerful and faster – the portability and ease of sharing an online spreadsheet tips the scales for me to using a Cloud-based solution (I’m also not a big fan of the “ribbon” in the newest versions of Excel – I can’t find most of the commands I know and love anymore!).
Mike Koss
4 Mar 10 at 12:10 pm
I knew a guy who knew a guy that did all his letter writing and publishing in Excel. Layout control made easy! (Maybe Excel was the inspiration of the table based layouts of Web 1, LOL)
Lloyd Budd
4 Mar 10 at 8:07 pm
I think its one of the most dangerous apps ever made. One can lay the current financial crisis at its feet since without it all those multiple tranche, default swap, collateralized debt, spooky high correlation million row spreadsheets would have been out of the hands of the crazies that were inclined to risk OPM in the glorious pursuit of bonus commissions.
I don’t want to paint people like Mike as the Oppenheimers of the software world, but maybe, just maybe, couldn’t those guys left out the cut-n’-paste feature. I’m sure that without cut-n’-paste we would be in a much better shape globally than we are today. Financial types are not rewarded for the ability to 10 key so without that feature they would have gotten tired long before everything blew up.
Grant BlahaErath
10 Mar 10 at 6:46 pm