Why Microsoft Excel is So Popular - My Opinion

MS Excel is the most popular member of the Office family. Nothing can rival its popularity, and still today has no contender in the application world. Google Sheets, Libre Office, Open Office, are just pale imitations of what it can do. We are in the age of database applications, Sharepoint, Mobile and Web apps, and still, MS Excel flourishes.

As a former Management accountant myself, I used MS Excel a lot. Even having many internal tools, applications and databases, Excel was the most widely used, just for everything.


Still, it has some disadvantages that makes an application more viable, and I'll explore that later.

So, why is Excel so popular:
- no training is needed, you just open a sheet and type in information, write easy formulas
- no additional applications need to be installed (frameworks, databases, run-times)
- the file format is universal. Linux and Mac OS, mobile phones, web apps all can read and write to Excel.
- all kinds of activities can be done in Excel, such as:

• store data. Its sheets are like database tables, you can save data in them. Thousands of rows, and Excel can manage them quickly.
• filter, find, summarize, report on data. Filters, pivots, charts are very easy mechanism to analyze and search for data. No other tool can rival the ease of doing this.
• Formulas - it lets you build scenarios, budgets, calculate, optimize and simulations. The flexibility is just unparalleled.
• VBA : you can automate your work with programming. Very easy, using Visual Basic language.
• Lots of other functionalities: statistical functions/packages, connections with databases, and the web, etc
• Extreme flexibility: add comments, edit fields, change formulas, with a click.

Still, Excel has some disadvantages, mostly coming from its advantages:

• cannot deal with big volumes of data. Starting with 10k rows in a sheet, things become slow and unpractical.
• extreme flexibility has a cost. Data can be changed, formulas erased, information lost... and sharing the data is not efficient, leading to duplication, misunderstanding. The risks of running lots of complex data in Excel are very high.
• Filtering and data search functions still have some limitations. SQL, in my opinion, is more powerful. (and harder to write, also)
• VBA, the programming language and system of macros behind the data sheets is not efficient and clean code, scalability is an issue. You can use for simple things,but when there are multiple users, lots of data, complex business logic, a modern language such as C# can deal with these in a better way.

 

Somebody said that the 70% of all business logic of companies is in Excel. Working 15 years in a corporate environment (4 big companies), I can confirm this. Excel is the first option, when it comes to data analysis, reporting etc.

Do other applications have any chance to develop and flourish? Can they help to automate things and make life easier in a company? Yes and no.

Let's have a look to the possibilities for substituting MS Excel with an application.

Pros:

- in the case where the rules are clear and established, and the volume of data is big, an application makes more sense. 

Cons:

- where the data is small, and/or the rules are changing and much flexibility is needed, Excel is still a better solution.

So what's the right approach to substitute the bad part of Excel? Probably understanding the constant, rule-based, or algorithmic part of business processes, and write applications for them, while still using Excel in parallel to solve smaller, flexible tasks.

What do you think? Would you write an application to make Excel based processes more efficient?