Lessons from forty years of Excel: if you give people tools, expect them to be used

One of the anniversaries I missed last year was that of Microsoft Excel, which turned forty in August.

I think that anybody who has worked in enterprise technology over any part of those four decades will have mixed feelings about Excel. On one hand, they will be grateful for a flexible tool which almost everybody has access to, most people know how to use, and which can be used for modelling and forecasting without the need to run big projects or write complex programmes. On the other hand, they will remember the times when a major upgrade was delayed because of a set of fragile, convoluted macros, when a business critical operation depended on a spreadsheet which only one person understood, or when they were asked to ‘just’ take the logic embedded in a spreadsheet and make it into a system that worked for the whole company.