Excel is the modern equivalent of the back of a napkin. It is inescapable.
And then they import to excel.
I like CSV as a format!
Plus, I guess there are office 365 outages, but the outage I personally hear more chatter about is the hosted exchange services (outlook), you will still need an email server in a post ai world, right?
But firstly, it's a legitimate choice for normies who just want to run a business, and second, as I said, the criticisms this article brings would be applicable to any other big tech provider who is laying off staff and leaning heavily into LLMs.
How long would it take FOSS to replace this? How long would businesses and their shareholders will wait? Buying Microsoft will GUARANTEE that you'll have the certification you need in weeks, how long would FOSS would ship and PROVE that they obey a non-open "open" standard?
Will FOSS GUARANTEE cross-compatibility of the file format?
What you are proposing isn't stupid if the most important goal is independence. Most businesses don't care about independence. They PREFER dependencies they can blame and sue / settle with.
If it's necessary to recreate all the keyboard shortcuts for Excel like Emacs has done with evil-mode for vim, maybe that works, I don't know.
Hell the finance guys can almost make their own replacement on their own today, with AI.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-pa...
Handling simultaneous edits, guaranteeing correctness, handling massive data sets… as amazing as AI is, this is a huge can of worms.
Any nontrivial excel sheet should be a database backed application, the finance guys who build them are in every sense programmers they're just using the wrong tool by convention.
I agree with you, BTW, but I've never seen moving Excel sheets to an application work in practice. You can do it, and it just creates more Excel sheets.
* Redo UI patterns (for old users): Only matter for on-boarding and compatibility, and probably need to redo the anti-patterns, not necessarily a good idea, or at least must be hold before the next:
* Define a much better internal model than excel has (I bet a mixture of relational, array model as core, then a reactive layer on top), including proper support for correct datatypes (not localized!), dates in all shapes, currency, commodities, unit of measure, etc, tables default as fixed type per column instead of free-form, then we have proper "variant" values, use algebraic types, and so on...
* Then redo the UI
* Define how import/export correctly (so not more non-sense about import based on localized dates, currencies...)
* ... and from legacy formats like Excel
P.D: I explore the idea on https://tablam.org and my goal is eventually marry what excel+access do in one app
So long as you don't have things which aren't dates but which Excel insists totally are. (Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2429759-involuntary-celibacy...)
But yes, cans of worms are many, and Tardis-like they are larger inside than out.
Let the dinosaurs go extinct!
Edit: actually I think there's got to be a far better and completely different UI that's possible now with AI. There has to be something better. What is it? I don't know. Some clever specialist will invent it.
Just throw the raw data at the LLM and tell it to do the analysis directly on that, and there's a good chance it will use python and some data science libraries for you.
And if you want, it'll turn it into a web page where people can drag and drop more raw data files on to get updated analytics.
The real grip comes from entire business processes implemented across dozens of worksheets with incredibly complicated cross linked formulae relying on Excel edge case behavior. As soon as LibreOffice et al display the most minute differences they're done and will never be mentioned again.
If you're just doing lists with maybe some simple calcs (which is what most people use spreadsheets for most of the time), pretty much anything works.
The vast majority of people I have seen using Excel don't know how to write a formula. Now they just started copy-pasting whatever ChatGPT was telling them to copy-paste, but well... and anyway all the alternatives do support formulas of course.
Why would they give a shit about the little comfort of the employees who don't want to learn new shortcuts?
Otherwise calc has everything for most people. Macros work different a little.
I've been finding myself using Google Sheets more, which has the potential for the same problems in this article.
The computation side is trivial in comparison. But with AI, emulating the UI becomes far easier.
Big business kind of wants 24/4 support that those will not be providing at all though? Plus the various nonsense certifications. I mean try to convince anyone in corporate to use Libre and they'll probably just laugh.
(not that they would ever use that support, they just want to have someone to scapegoat lol)
Row Zero's fully Excel compatible, including keyboard shortcuts, long-tail pivot table configurability, 500+ built-in formulas like LAMBDA and LET, and real-time collab. But it scales 1000x beyond Excel (2 billion row limit vs 1 million for Excel), has built in connectors to everything (Databricks, Postgres, S3, Snowflake, etc), native Python support, deep AI integration with Databricks Genie, and all the security and data governance features to make big banks and healthcare providers comfortable. It's built by the team who brought Rust into AWS and rewrote S3's file system circa 2018.
We're used by individuals and small businesses all the way up to huge deployments in the Fortune 100.
Source: Was founder and CEO, now leading spreadsheet development at Databricks
But is it 1-2-3 compatible?
Excel was for a time when programming meant more arcane languages. In 2026, there is no excuse for a business major not to know Python or R. They're both easy.
Also Excel is probably the best thing MS produces. There is lower hanging fruit elsewhere
Unfortunately I have to.
I can tell you all of the Excel alternatives are extremely disappointing.
And the 3k commits in a month, all good signs
/s
They own 27% of OpenAI. I don't think that having all of them swap to ChatGPT is necessarily going to have the effect you're hoping.
However, leaders are advised by their underlings, who are swayed by their technical officers, who are charmed by the commercial arm of corporations.
The only effective path to actual change is to charm the technical officers with a product that is strictly superior in the metrics they care about. They'll then work their way up the chain.
We should stop referring to management at companies as "leaders". They don't lead anything. They perform administrative tasks so that their employees can actually do the real work.
Probably not gonna work: those "technical" officers are mouse-click engineers. IOW, they don't know much detail, but they sure as hell know where to click!
There are exabytes of documents in Microsoft formats that can be at best "read" with a significant level of data corruption in other products (formatting errors). Writing them back out with shredding them is hit & miss at best. Entire MS products have no equivalent at all that can open their file formats, such as MS Access and Power BI.
Word isn't just paragraphs, italic, and bold.
Excel has features you probably have never even heard of, but people use at scale. Things like tabular data connections using OData. It's the front-end for SQL Server Analysis Services. It has the Mashup columnar engine from Power BI built in to it. Etc, etc, etc.
These things are massive products, with deep integrations across each other, third-party software, third-party plugins, cloud products, and on and on.
There's easily several million man-years of effort sunk into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.
Switching costs are not a matter of failing to "somehow convince" people to switch.
The switching costs are on the order of trillions of dollars, not a decision to be taken lightly.
Here's some critical points everybody normally ignores in these discussion:
1) Partial switching doesn't help, because now you have two problems!
2) Everyone else has to switch too. Google Workspace people were laughing during the Outlook outage, eeeeexcept... they couldn't send or receive emails either -- because their business partners, vendors, and customers likely used Outlook.
3) The alternative with the same features, same level of integration, same commercial support, etc... is the same thing, with the same problems, but just a different brand.
You can't escape the reality of this, it is what it is, there's no nirvana that we could all achieve if we "just" did something "simple".
Yeah I've watched Joel Spolsky's "you suck at excel" tutorial, but I've also created financial models for CFOs and the finance team using Excel instead of doing an RShint App because I wanted them to be able to understand and extend the model.
It's software. It can be recreated, more easily than ever.
I'm saying people should put their MS license fees towards in house devs working on open source projects to achieve the goal, rather than just let MS Hoover it up to waste on Copilot interfaces that nobody ever uses. Let the local devs squander that money, after they have reimplemented all the Excel keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice and added abhorrent plotting themes that recapitulate 30 years of incompetent Microsoft practices.
Idealistic? Sure. But why not try.
- what do "financial models for CEOs" contain apart from long rows and some numeric columns on which elementary arithmetic was applied on?
One of Excel's many powers is letting people play with numbers in cells and see the results of long chains of computations. Or create an array of potential values and see the results across a wide variety of inputs. Or even use the builtin solver to find the value that minimizes or maximizes a desired output...
And thats before starting on the pivot tables!!!
What does AI have to do with it? Are you proposing that we replace Excel for accounting purposes with something vibecoded? That sounds a bit nuts to me. You can pay a bit of money for mature software that will probably not fail to add 2 + 2 correctly and will not run away with your wife, so why give that up?
I actually suspect that companies such as Microsoft pushing for AI everywhere may undermine that proposition... but then, the alternative is probably LibreOffice Calc, which is eminently boring and doesn't have Copilot popping up.
Great term!! :)
What MS365 does best (for now) is being a one stop shop for user/permissions/device management and coming with outlook/exchange/Teams - nobody with purchasing power gives a shit if ppl get Excel or LibreCalc as spreadsheet, they get it because it comes with the rest.
Also: No home-grown CRM will have, in the long run, uptimes anywhere approaching e.g. Office365. You're just smearing one large outage into a lot more small ones, plus a few data losses.
That rent buys you something. The internal development buys you something very different. You might want to make a reasoned call on what you're buying instead of making GDP predictions.