By Hiran de Silva
As Excel approaches its 40th anniversary, the noise on social media is deafening. Posts celebrating “Excel’s growth” tend to measure progress in the most trivial way imaginable: how many functions it has today compared to yesterday.
That’s not just shallow — it’s absurd.
The measure of any tool, any innovation, is not how many features it has. It is:
What difference does it make in the world in which it is used?
And in Excel’s case, that world has two very different interpretations.
1. Industry’s Measure: Productivity and Efficiency
From a business perspective, the only thing that matters is whether Excel enables industry to run leaner, smarter, and faster.
Has Excel made organizations more efficient? Has it created opportunities to maximize productivity? Are processes smoother, less manual, more reliable?
The answer is: it depends. Because while Excel can deliver enterprise-scale efficiency, the reality is that in too many places, it has been turned into “Excel Hell” — sprawling, fragile, manually intensive processes.
When management sees the difference between Excel done badly and Excel done right, the contrast is so spectacular that transformation becomes a no-brainer. There is no rational argument for keeping the “bad Excel” version.
2. Social Media’s Measure: Likes and Followers
Now let’s look at the other world — the world of influencers.
Here, progress is measured not by productivity but by engagement. How many likes? How many followers? How many flashy tutorials can be churned out showing off the latest function or feature?
This has nothing to do with whether businesses are running more efficiently. It has everything to do with generating content that feeds the algorithm.
And often, what gets celebrated as “modern Excel” on social media gets imported uncritically into organizations — creating solutions that are harder to manage, less maintainable, and ironically more manual than what came before. Management’s verdict? A universal rejection: this is not what we want.
Two Universes, One Tool
So has Excel advanced over the decades?
From the perspective of influencers, yes — because more features mean endless content opportunities.
From the perspective of management, yes — but for the opposite reason. Excel’s real progress lies in its ability to bridge the widening gap between “Excel done bad” and “Excel done right.”
The irony? Excel hasn’t fundamentally changed in the ways that matter. What has changed is the gap between its true potential and the way it’s popularly (mis)used. And the bigger that gap gets, the more valuable Excel becomes to those who know how to use it properly.
The 40-Year Reality Check
As social media rushes to celebrate Excel’s birthday with cosmetic highlights and function-count trivia, the real story is far more serious.
- Excel has created enormous opportunities for productivity and efficiency.
- Social media has simultaneously misdirected entire generations of users into Excel Hell.
- The true power of Excel lies not in the noise of new features but in its proven ability to transform business processes when deployed correctly.
That is what we should be celebrating at 40 years. Not the superficial. Not the trivial. But the fact that Excel remains one of the most powerful, misunderstood, and under-realized innovations in business history.
And the question for the next 40 years is not “how many functions will Excel have?”
It is: Will we finally use it properly?
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