There are two main ways Excel has set the broad roadmap for the B2B software industry for decades, and will continue to for years to come: Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone. If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.

These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form.

Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains.

It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Excel’s most lasting impact extends beyond the spreadsheet itself.Įxcel may be the most influential software ever built. “Proficient in the Microsoft Office Suite” is so meaningless that it’s become a meme, but the ability to bend one specific Office program, Excel, to one’s will is a badge of honor.īut the enduring, passionate user fervor for the product isn’t even its most unique attribute. Whether they realized it or not, they were becoming programmers, or at least no-code practitioners before the no-code movement took off. Anyone who has worked in finance or consulting grew up on it, learned to love it over thousands of hours of practice and improvement.

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