Excel at 40: What Are We Really Celebrating?

As Excel turns 40, I find myself asking: what exactly are we celebrating?

For many, the anniversary is framed around cosmetic features—new formulas, shortcuts, or tricks that make for nice LinkedIn posts. The celebration looks polished, easy to like, and social-media friendly. But do these things really capture Excel’s true significance in business, industry, and society?

I would argue not.

The Missing Milestone

The most important milestone in Excel’s history is not a shiny feature at all. It is connectivity—the moment Excel became part of the digital nervous system of organisations. The introduction of client-server, hub-and-spoke architecture turned Excel from a personal calculator into a central player in enterprise process management.

Yet, this milestone is often omitted from the story. Instead, we get nostalgic lists of features or influencers posting keyboard shortcuts—like how to delete blank rows.

But let’s pause here. If you encounter a spreadsheet with blank rows, shouldn’t your first thought be: why are there blank rows in the first place? What upstream process created them? What flaw in design or data flow is this revealing?

That’s the real question.

A keyboard shortcut to delete blank rows may be clever. But it’s also a distraction. It’s like noticing a chair with three legs and focusing on its color, rather than the fact that the fourth leg is missing. One way of thinking leads nowhere. The other way leads to systemic improvement.

Excel’s True Significance

Excel’s impact is two-sided:

1. It created enormous value in industry—streamlining reporting, enabling real-time collaboration, and often outpacing “big systems.”
2. It also spawned an unnecessary “alternatives to Excel” industry, fuelled largely by frustration, poor training, and misunderstandings of Excel’s true capabilities.

Both sides are worth recognising. But neither side is captured in the cosmetic narratives that dominate social media today.

Seeing and Thinking Differently

The deeper issue here is not about features at all. It is about what happens in our minds when we see something in Excel.

• Do we see a shortcut, or do we see an opportunity?
• Do we fix symptoms, or do we fix causes?
• Do we chase “likes,” or do we create lasting value?

When I worked at Edexcel in the late 1990s, I stumbled across an error while trying to use Excel’s “Get External Data” feature. IT told me it wasn’t installed. My first thought was: then this organisation must be missing something important. That single line of thought eventually led to solutions that eliminated duplication, solved audit problems upstream, and transformed processes—adding millions of pounds in value.

Not because I found a shortcut. But because I asked: why is this problem here in the first place?

The same mindset led to projects where we eliminated entire external processes by rethinking how spreadsheets fed into databases. Not a cosmetic change—an architectural one.

The Celebration That Matters

So, what should we celebrate at 40 years of Excel?

• Not the superficial features that win likes on LinkedIn.
• Not the tricks that patch over inefficiencies.
• But the thinking that Excel makes possible—the kind of thinking that can transform a process, a department, sometimes even a whole organisation.

That is the difference between thoughts that create no value, and thoughts that open the door to enormous opportunity.

And perhaps the real question on Excel’s 40th birthday is this:

When you open a spreadsheet, what do you see?

A shortcut, or a missing leg on the chair?

A cosmetic trick, or an architectural opportunity?

Because Excel doesn’t just reveal data. It reveals how we think.