You know a piece of software has real staying power when even Satya Nadella, in a resurfaced clip from 1993, looks at his younger self demoing Excel and jokes, “Less hair. Same love for Excel!” And honestly? Same, Satya. Same.

Because if we’re being totally straight here, Excel may just be the real “killer app” of the entire digital revolution—not generative AI, not mobile, not whatever blockchain is doing these days. Nope. It’s the humble spreadsheet. 

From VisiCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel, this thing has survived every platform shift, every tech wave, every corporate re-org, every “Excel-killer” startup pitch deck, and yes, every CIO who has sworn, “We’re going to modernize this process this year.” Sure you are.

But here’s the twist in today’s story:

It turns out the people who love Excel the most aren’t the Boomers who lived through the PC era… and they’re not even the Gen X finance warriors who can build a nested IF statement faster than most of us can make coffee. Nope.

It’s Gen Z and Millennials. The digital natives. The “AI generation.”The ones we were absolutely sure would ditch Excel the moment someone whispered “automation.”

A new Datarails report blows up that assumption like a poorly structured macro. According to the study, 54% of 22–32-year-old finance professionals say they love Excel—not tolerate it, not use it begrudgingly, but genuinely love it. That’s significantly higher than older generations. And not only do they love it, but they also live in it:
More than a quarter spend seven or more hours a day in spreadsheets. Nearly 80% of young finance workers spend five hours or more inside Excel every single workday.

If you think about it, this shouldn’t surprise us. Spreadsheets are the great equalizer. They’re the sitcom of software—simple enough for anyone to pick up, rich enough for experts to produce magic, endlessly rerunnable, and perpetually underrated.

Which brings me to the title of this piece.

Everybody Loves Excel

Yes, it’s a bit of a wink to Everybody Loves Raymond, the show where no matter the chaos of the episode, everything ultimately came back to this one universal truth: Everybody loved Raymond, even when he drove them nuts.

Excel is the Ray Barone of modern computing. Sure, it may exasperate you. It may crash right before you hit save. It may refuse to carry a formula across a column because you missed one tiny absolute reference. But at the end of the day? We come home to Excel. We trust Excel. We build our lives around Excel. And deep down, we love Excel.

Finance pros, especially, don’t just use the spreadsheet—they form emotional attachments to it. The Datarails report found a whopping 82% of respondents have high or moderate emotional attachment to Excel. Emotional attachment? That’s the kind of customer loyalty only three things normally earn: pizza, golden retrievers, and the Pittsburgh Steelers in a good year.

But wait—there’s more. Excel is so important to these younger professionals that 78% say they would decline or reluctantly accept a job that banned Excel. Think about that. We have reached a point where HR could make a job offer with a six-figure salary and a corner office… and the candidate replies, “Sorry, can’t take it. You’re a Google Sheets shop.”

And don’t get too comfortable, older generations—we see you clutching your spreadsheets just as tightly. For Gen X and Boomers, over 90% say Excel will remain as important or more important over the next decade, and nearly all would refuse a job that outlawed Excel.
This is cross-generational unity you can’t find anywhere else—not in politics, not in music, not in whether pineapple belongs on pizza. But Excel? That’s the great cultural common ground.

The Spreadsheet is Still the Center of Gravity

Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of an AI supercycle. Every vendor on the expo floor—from hyperscalers to scrappy startups—has a booth plastered with “AI-powered,” “agentic,” “predictive,” or “autonomous.” According to industry estimates, 78% of new funding in the $89 billion CFO tech stack in 2025 went to AI-driven solutions. And all of that is impressive—but here’s the punchline: Excel is unfazed.

Finance professionals report that 89% of their workflows still touch Excel—from forecasting to FP&A to month-end close. Mid-sized and enterprise organizations lean on it even harder.

And even in a world where AI can write code, refactor pipelines, triage tickets, generate product specs, and maybe one day do your laundry—Excel continues to quietly perform its duties, without drama, without hype, without requiring GPU clusters that cost more than a Manhattan condo.

Honestly, this is the part where I get a little sentimental. Because there’s something noble, almost heroic, about software that does its job for 40 years and still refuses to retire. Excel is the Carmela Soprano of digital tools: Looks modest, but secretly runs the whole operation.

Respect the Skillset

And come on now, tell the truth. You get a little weak in the knees around anyone who can turn a pivot table with the best of them. Or the ones who know how to whip up a VLOOKUP (or XLOOKUP, if you’re fancy) under pressure. Or the rare sorcerers who understand Excel macros so deeply that no one questions them when they say, “Give me a minute, I can automate that. You meet people like this and you think, “Okay, this person has seen some things.”

And yes, we all know the famous startup line: “Our biggest competitor? Excel.”

Founders say it half-jokingly, half-terrified—because they know it’s true. When customers can solve a problem with a spreadsheet, it’s very hard to convince them they need your SaaS offering with 12 onboarding sessions and a 24-month contract.

AI Isn’t Killing Excel — It’s Supercharging It

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. AI isn’t replacing Excel. AI is moving into Excel’s spare bedroom and helping with chores.

From Copilot generating formulas to AI models cleaning data, building dashboards, and even optimizing spreadsheets you’ve been dragging around for years—Excel is becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more durable.

The very people using AI the most—Gen Z and Millennials—are the same ones spending the most time inside Excel. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the future, and this is why, when people ask me, “Shimmy, what technology is going to outlast everyone in the AI era?” I usually lean back, grin, and give them the answer they don’t expect:

“The spreadsheet, my friend. The spreadsheet is immortal.”

Because say what you want about AI replacing coding, automating ops, rewriting workflows, or reinventing DevOps… Excel has quietly won every battle for four decades. And like the cockroach—nature’s ultimate survivor—it may just inherit the earth.

Shimmy’s take this with you . . .

So yes, in a world obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the calm, steady, quietly brilliant software that built entire industries.

Excel isn’t just surviving the AI wave—it’s riding it like a seasoned pro who’s seen every hype cycle and still shows up to work every morning.

Everybody loves Excel. And deep down, everybody always has.