There can't be many 40-year-old programs still in widespread use, but Microsoft Excel is one of them. Nearly nine-in-ten companies, indeed, use it to run their financial processes.
According to new research, it's not the old stagers that are the biggest fans of the spreadsheet package – it's Gen Z and Millennial workers.
Analysis from Datarails found 40% of finance professionals across the US and UK prefer the spreadsheet software to other options, even ranking it higher than ERP systems at 26% for financial planning.
Accountants were particularly keen, with 57% of respondents citing Excel as their go-to platform.
Enthusiasm for the software varies across generations, however. More than half (54%) of 22-32-year-olds in the CFO’s office said they love Excel, yet that fell to just 39% for both 33-50-year-olds and those older than 51.
"That love comes from experience,” Datarails noted. “83% of younger users spend more than five hours each day in the spreadsheet, falling to only around 70% for older cohorts.”
"In fact, more than one in four (27%) of 22-32-year-olds spend more than seven hours a day in Excel. It essentially occupies their entire workday."
Indeed, 78% of younger pros said they would either decline a job that banned Excel or accept it only grudgingly.
Excel’s importance will live on
Looking ahead, 84% believe Excel will stay just as important or become more important over the next decade, with only 15% predicting a decline.
Among Gen Z and Millennials, however, this figure rises, with 89% of respondents touting the platform’s continued popularity and importance.
"When we asked finance professionals to describe their relationship with Excel, 82% reported high or moderate emotional attachment,” Datarails said.
“But here’s where it gets interesting: 43% describe the relationship as 'love/hate', calling it essential and reliable yet also frustrating and manual," said Datarails.
Notably, only 12% said they outright hate Excel.
What makes Excel so popular?
According to Datarails, Excel has several key plus points. These include its flexibility in building exactly what finance professionals need, and the fact that it’s more or less a ‘universal language’ across finance teams.
There are downsides, however. More than one-quarter (28%) cited data consolidation as their biggest frustration, 23% said they struggle with data entry and updates, 22% pointed to version control and tracking changes, and 14% said they face collaboration challenges.
Elsewhere, Datarails found the biggest downside identified by finance professionals was error management. Almost every respondent noted they’d discovered a material Excel error in their team’s work before it was shared internally.
With regard to improvements, finance professionals said they would like more automated data consolidation while maintaining Excel’s existing interface. Similarly, respondents said they want more version control and collaboration – without losing spreadsheet flexibility.
Naturally, a significant number of respondents said they’d like to see better error protection and prevention features.
Excel is evolving
As with most of Microsoft’s core software products, Excel is evolving amidst an influx of generative and agentic AI features.
Users can now generate formulas using Copilot, for example, automating tasks to avoid filling out large numbers of cells and fiddling around with formulas.
Yet this transformation of the platform has prompted some criticism in recent months, largely due to accuracy concerns. As ITPro reported in September this year, Microsoft itself urged caution when using new AI features.
Advice on the company’s support page warned users against relying on the software’s AI capabilities for financial reporting, legal documents, or other “high-stakes” scenarios.
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