Somewhere right now, a billion-dollar company is making a critical decision based on a spreadsheet that Dave from finance built three years ago. Nobody fully understands the formulas. Dave left last January. But the spreadsheet lives on, updated weekly by someone who inherited it and is terrified of breaking it.

This is the reality of modern business. We’ve spent decades and trillions of dollars building sophisticated enterprise software, and Excel is still the tool that actually runs things.

The Numbers Are Staggering

Microsoft estimates that over 750 million people worldwide use Excel regularly. A 2023 study from the Financial Modelling Institute found that 83% of businesses rely on spreadsheets for critical financial processes. Not supplementary processes. Critical ones.

We’re talking about budget forecasting, inventory management, pricing models, project tracking, HR planning, and compliance reporting. The kind of work that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were specifically designed to handle — and yet Excel persists.

Why It Won’t Die

The obvious answer is familiarity. Most white-collar workers learn Excel early in their careers. It’s taught in universities, expected on resumes, and available on virtually every corporate computer on the planet.

But familiarity alone doesn’t explain its dominance. Plenty of people are familiar with tools they don’t actually use. Excel endures because it solves a specific problem better than anything else: it lets non-technical people build custom solutions quickly.

Need to model a pricing scenario? Open Excel. Want to track project milestones? Excel. Need to reconcile two data sets that your IT department says would take six weeks to connect through proper channels? Fifteen minutes in Excel with a VLOOKUP.

That flexibility is its superpower. Excel is the world’s most popular programming environment, and most of its users don’t even think of themselves as programmers.

The Shadow IT Problem

Of course, this creates issues. Lots of them.

When critical business processes run on spreadsheets, you get what IT departments call “shadow IT” — systems that exist outside official infrastructure, ungoverned and unaudited. A single misplaced decimal point in a spreadsheet formula caused JPMorgan Chase to lose over $6 billion in the London Whale incident. A copy-paste error. In Excel.

Most companies won’t lose billions, but they lose plenty. Pricing errors, reporting mistakes, version control disasters where three people are working on different copies of the “master” file. We’ve all been there.

The risk scales with complexity. A simple expense tracker in Excel is fine. A 47-tab workbook with nested macros that feeds into a quarterly board report? That’s a ticking time bomb.

Why Enterprise Software Hasn’t Replaced It

So if Excel is risky, why haven’t purpose-built tools replaced it? Because enterprise software has a fundamental problem: it’s rigid.

When you implement an ERP or a project management platform, you’re accepting someone else’s opinion about how your processes should work. The software has workflows, fields, and structures that were designed for a generic version of your industry. Making it fit your specific business requires customisation — which means consultants, timelines, and budgets.

Excel has none of those constraints. You open a blank grid and build exactly what you need. No tickets to IT. No waiting for the next release cycle. No compromise.

For a fast-moving business that needs answers now, that trade-off is worth the risk. And honestly, for most use cases, the risk is manageable.

The Middle Ground

The smartest companies aren’t trying to eliminate Excel. They’re trying to contain it. They build proper systems for the high-stakes, high-volume processes — payroll, customer data, regulatory reporting — and let Excel handle the ad hoc, experimental, and one-off work it’s genuinely good at.

Some are going further, using tools like Microsoft Power Automate to connect Excel to their core systems, so the spreadsheet becomes a front-end for structured data rather than a standalone silo.

Others are investing in data literacy, teaching their teams when a spreadsheet is the right tool and when it’s time to graduate to something more structured. The goal isn’t to ban Excel. It’s to make sure people understand its limits.

The Honest Truth

Excel isn’t going anywhere. Not in five years, probably not in twenty. It’s too flexible, too accessible, and too deeply embedded in how organisations actually work.

The companies that thrive aren’t the ones fighting that reality. They’re the ones managing it — keeping Excel where it belongs and building guardrails around the rest.

If that sounds unglamorous, it’s because it is. But then, most of the important work in business is.