Why use Excel in 2024?
Created in 1985, Excel has significantly transformed the world and even today still reigns as the king of the spreadsheet world, with over 750 million users.
Despite the plethora of more sophisticated visualization tools, designed to manage bigger or even massive amount of data and improve the analysis experience, the world has clung on to Excel. Excel is truly the product no data analysts, accountants as well as many other professionals in every industry, could live without.
At Velixo, it reminded us of articles such as this one, and some of its priceless quotes: “You can have my excel, after you ripped it from my cold, dead hands“, or “Giving up on Excel is like asking whether we’ve given up drinking”.
The arguments (of the past) against Excel
Excel got some bad vibes a few years ago. Detractors often mentioned that Excel was a tool of the past, that it was inflexible, not optimized for analyzing data, not scalable and created silos of files and manual human interventions that were highly error-prone and created a maintenance nightmare for IT and users alike.
While some of those arguments were true, major software enhancements, deep integrations, innovations and advances in hybrid and cloud environments have completely changed the game!
Excel Today
Excel continued to be massively invested in by Microsoft, as one of its flagship products in the Office suite, now rebranded Microsoft 365.
It has become a highly integrated, cross-platform, hybrid (on-premises or cloud) tool that solved all earlier limitations and barriers, and is simply unrivalled when it comes to simplicity, flexibility, governance, collaboration, formatting, and printing, as well as extensibility.
It is the world #1 reporting tool and is so prominent in both the personal and business worlds, as it is included in every Microsoft subscription by default, at an affordable price.
Here, we give you a few reasons why you should not look elsewhere:
| Other vendors simply cannot match Microsoft Excel features and innovation pace.
Leveraging Excel gives you innovation guarantees from Microsoft. |
Simplicity. Flexibility.
Excel formulas and functions are not only fun and all encompassing, but they are also extremely powerful; and you do not have to be an IT professional to master them. |
Cross Platform
Fully supported on Desktop computers or Mobile devices. For software or web-app lovers. On Apple, Microsoft, or Google devices. |
| Formatting dream. Pixel Perfect.
Excel’s unlimited cell-based grid allows for perfect formatting and layouts. It is also fully native and integrated with other packaging apps such as Word and PowerPoint. |
Fully collaborative
Integrations with Teams, co-authoring, notes, modern comments to name a few of the collaboration features of Excel. |
Track changes, auto-save and conflict resolution
Ensures users can collaboratively work on the same files while ensuring full governance, history, and traceability. |
| Visualizations
It also comes with an impressive set of charts visualization features that specialised software struggle to match. |
Microsoft 365 SharePoint, OneDrive cloud storage
To organise, store and fully governed your assets. |
Automations
Using tools like Power Automate, everything that happens in Excel or outside of even the Microsoft 365 ecosystem can trigger an action. |
| Copilot and AI integrations
There is more to come on top of the Analyze data feature of Excel! With Microsoft’s enormous push into AI and Microsoft 365 Co-pilot, Excel has become the perfect productivity tool, and there will be more to come. |
Pervasiveness
80% of businesses use Microsoft 365 for emails and Excel is included in every Microsoft 365 subscription, even the most basic ones. Wouldn’t you say it is free then? |
Dynamic content
Dynamic arrays and spilling range of content deserve their own category! This made Excel a completely different beast, further enabling reporting and reducing maintenance for creators. |
Finally: Excel’s extensibility! With Excel’s macro language and extensibility options, everything is possible.
We guarantee you that we will struggle to maintain this page, given Microsoft’s innovation pace, or maybe we’ll post another in one year-time. Trying to predict what capabilities Excel may add (especially with exponential advances) in AI is a dangerous game…
Excel with Velixo
At Velixo, we understood users love Excel and are not prepared to quit Excel, and even if their ERP, CRM, or their other enterprise applications are fully web and possibly in the cloud (and so is Excel!).
80% of users who considered alternatives end up using Excel anyway.
We also wanted to focus on accelerating business outcomes for our customers, and enhance user experiences for reporting, budgeting, and integrating with those ERP and enterprise applications.
Why focus on platforms and features, when Microsoft Excel and Microsoft 365 already solve this for everybody, with a community of more than 750 million users?
Other reporting or BI vendors are making this mistake and are paying the price of spending considerable development time reproducing Excel or other Microsoft 365 features. The result is simple, alternatives simply do not offer those features or the same quality.
No one wants to be left out behind the curve, so choose smart, and review how using Velixo with Excel for your ERP adds even more value .