Max Chaffkin (2:19)

It's the XL World Championship. Who is going to win? It's the xl.

Sarah Holder (2:27)

Yep, that's right. We're talking about the world championship of Microsoft Excel. Dina Bass, who's covered Microsoft for decades and now writes about AI, says since the first competition in 2012, Microsoft excelling has become something of a serious esport.

Max Chaffkin (2:46)

All right, audience, we're going to need your help. We're going to count it down. We're going to start at 5. Let's go.

Sarah Holder (2:50)

It even has commentators.

Max Chaffkin (2:52)

3, 2, 1.

Dina Bass (2:55)

Have you ever seen, like, video game speedrunning where people try to finish, like a Mario game as quickly as possible that also has that, like, play by play commentary because otherwise, like, normal people wouldn't understand what's going on. They sort of give them something to solve. And you're watching it, but it moves so quickly you kind of don't know what you're watching the right side of.

Max Chaffkin (3:15)

The screen as well. If you're wondering what's flashing on the right side there, those are his keys and his shortcuts. So obviously at this level, what you're.

Sarah Holder (3:22)

Watching these pro spreadsheeters do is isn't too different from what millions of office workers around the country do every day, sit at a computer and put numbers into cells.

Max Chaffkin (3:34)

The genesis of this competition was financial modeling.

Sarah Holder (3:38)

That's Max Chaffkin, who writes for BusinessWeek and co hosts the magazine's podcast, Everybody's Business.

Max Chaffkin (3:44)

So it used to be a competition to see who is the best at financial modeling, which is of course, how most people use Microsoft Excel, and they changed it a couple years back to make it more accessible. So now what they model are. But at the end of the day, viewers are like looking at a spreadsheet, like a normal Excel spreadsheet, and there's like a little mini screen inside, like an inset screen, like on a video game, where you see the athlete clicking the mouse and manipulating the cells.

Sarah Holder (4:15)

It's not exactly an NBA game, but watch an accel wizard input functions at warp speed and your pulse might start racing, which is not the kind of emotion people usually associate with exc. Somehow, despite its association with badly lit offices and boring capitalist grunt work, Excel has become one of the most influential computer programs in the world. And not just in the world of esports.

Max Chaffkin (4:43)

Excel is like the most. I think it's like probably the most important piece of software that has ever been created. Basically, like it runs almost every single business, it runs every single nonprofit. It runs. Like, every any big organization you can think about is in some sense operating on Microsoft Excel because it's the dominant spreadsheet platform.

Sarah Holder (5:11)

I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on the show, Microsoft Excel is now 40 years old in an age of AI and Google Sheets. Can it last another 40?

Sarah Holder (5:28)

For many people, Microsoft Excel's classic green and white grid and its seemingly infinite scroll of columns and rows bring up strong feelings.

Max Chaffkin (5:38)

How do you feel about Microsoft Excel? I love using it.

Sarah Holder (5:42)

This is something our producer David Fox, discovered walking around New York City's Bryant park during a lunch break.

Max Chaffkin (5:47)

Do you have a favorite XL formula or function? Oh, my gosh.

Sarah Holder (5:52)

I mean, it's really basic, but I.

Max Chaffkin (5:54)

Love accountif or accounta.xlookup. hEA is a good one. I use a lot of if. And statements. I like being able to, like, copy things, you know, when you just drag the cursor down.

Sarah Holder (6:04)

I mean, if you're really a pro.

Max Chaffkin (6:05)

You don't use the mouse. But I will use the mouse just for efficiency.

Sarah Holder (6:10)

Bloomberg's Dina Bass and Max Chaffkin say those kinds of reactions are pretty typical.

Dina Bass (6:15)

Excel just symbolizes drudgery, right?

Max Chaffkin (6:18)

It's.

Dina Bass (6:18)

It's every workplace movie stereotype. You know, it's the office in Slough, it's office space and your nine bosses. The user interface is dull. It hasn't really changed much.

Max Chaffkin (6:33)

It's also, and this was suggested to me by Mish Kapoor, who's a spreadsheet pioneer, but it's also an embodiment of the things that we hate most about capitalism. Right? Like, Excel is about cutting costs. It's about optimizing. If you're, if you get laid off, like, guaranteed you were laid off because of a cell on an Excel spreadsheet. And I think we all, like, kind of understand that it's like the unfun parts of capitalism, right?

Sarah Holder (7:02)

Like we're all just numbers in an Excel file at the end of the day.

Max Chaffkin (7:06)

Exactly. I mean, I think for many people, including many power users, it is like a thing that they hate and a thing that they also appreciate. The thing for me, that kind of epitomized this, there's a very active community on Reddit for Excel. The most popular post of all time is somebody explaining how to watch Wall E inside of Microsoft Excel in order to trick their company's workplace software into thinking that they're using Excel when they're, in fact watching a movie.

Sarah Holder (7:38)

So they're on Excel for like an hour and 45 minutes, but they're just.

Max Chaffkin (7:41)

I love it because it totally epitomizes. First of all, this software is insanely powerful. Like, you can add up numbers, but you can also run full on programs. And yet, like, with all of that power, what you're doing is getting around the fact that you have to use the software in the first place.

Sarah Holder (7:59)

There are something like 500 million paying Excel users out there, according to Max and Dena's calculations based on Microsoft's public disclosures. Those users range from Excel social media influencers to employees at the US Department of War, finance guys, college students, and people like Steve Ballmer.

Max Chaffkin (8:20)

Most people think it's pretty weird. I keep a spreadsheet of how I spend my hours. When we interviewed Steve Ballmer, he was like, oh, yeah. I mean, like, I'm not really an Excel guy. And Then he showed us all these, like, all these insane ways that he was using it.

Sarah Holder (8:34)

Steve Ballmer headed Microsoft sales in the 80s and went on to become the company's CEO. He now owns the Los Angeles Clippers.

Max Chaffkin (8:42)

Okay, can you guys see that? Oh, my God.

Sarah Holder (8:46)

He showed Max and Dina the Excel spreadsheet he uses to organize his life.

Max Chaffkin (8:51)

So this is kind of my spreadsheet. 25 budget, 2025 actual year to date. How many nights am I away from home? What nights were they?

Dina Bass (9:03)

I've known Steve Ballmer for more than two decades. His entire brain is just a series of endless spreadsheets. That's the way he thinks.

Max Chaffkin (9:11)

I, of course, asked him, like, where's the bathroom time go? He's like, oh, that's personal time. Everything nine to five, I keep track of and anything. Clippers at night.

Sarah Holder (9:22)

Extreme as it may be, Ballmer's spreadsheet habit speaks to how Excel has morphed from a computational tool to. To a ubiquitous part of people's everyday lives. But how did the digital spreadsheet revolution start? Max says it begins in the 1970s, not with Microsoft or Excel, but with a program called VisiCalc.

Max Chaffkin (9:47)

We spoke to the inventor of VisiCalc, this guy named Dan Bricklin, who dreamed it up while he was in a business school class. There are things that look like spreadsheets, you know, from ancient Mesopotamia. But, like, he was like, wouldn't it be great if you could have one of these tables with numbers where it just calculates instantly? And he created, with a co founder, Bob Frankston, basically this kind of rough hewn spreadsheet called VisiCalc for the Apple II. It really was, I think, the thing that started the personal computing revolution.

Sarah Holder (10:22)

At the time, computers were mostly used by universities or large companies. They weren't in lots of people's homes or in most people's desks at work. But big technology companies like Microsoft were hoping to change that.

Dina Bass (10:36)

Microsoft's, like, early motto was, you know, a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software. But the problem is you have to convince people that they want this. Why would anybody want their own one of these things?

Sarah Holder (10:52)

Microsoft realized that spreadsheet software could be part of that pitch for selling more personal computers. Computers. So they decided to take what VisiCalc pioneered and iterate on it. They started working on a digital spreadsheet competitor. Was there a moment when Microsoft kind of realized this could be a really big deal for them as a company?

Max Chaffkin (11:16)

I mean, they knew from the jump. By the time the Excel project started in 83, which was originally called Project Odyssey, spreadsheets were a thing. Like, everyone knew that there were basically like two cool things you could do with a computer. One was word processing, like desktop publishing, and the other is spreadsheets. So Microsoft's like frantically like trying to like make their own spreadsheet. And they made, they made this original one, which was like a VisiCalc knockoff called MultiPlan that did not work out. And then they started working on another knockoff, which was a Lotus knockoff, Lotus being like at the time the most successful spreadsheet program. And, and they made this decision, which I think in retrospect it looks inspired to put it on the Mac. And not only did that help like propel the Mac, it also ends up propelling Microsoft because spreadsheets using this kind of graphical interface, the point and click thing, it's just like a way more elegant version of the experience. And that then sort of propels Excel to become the dominant spreadsheet platform. And then that gets juiced by like a ton of sort of Microsoft, you know, hard nosed business behavior.

Sarah Holder (12:33)

One of the key business strategies was selling subscriptions to several of their software apps together as a package. That package was called Microsoft Office.

Max Chaffkin (12:43)

I think if you're trying to understand like how did Microsoft sort of use Excel to, to propel itself to this dominance, like in one word, it's bundling. As Microsoft evolved into the 90s, they start making all these deals with big companies and with computer manufacturers. So it becomes this like thing where you can't really switch your spreadsheet without making a bunch of other changes that could be potentially disruptive to your business.

Dina Bass (13:11)

The bundle got even bigger sort of in the cloud era because ultimately Microsoft winds up doing this, you know, cloud license offering where if you're a corpor, every employee gets everything in one thing. It ends up becoming, it ends up being called Microsoft 365 and you can't take those pieces apart. And look, I had a CIO tell me while I was researching a different story about a year ago that his CEO was trying to figure out how they could save money on software and came over to him and said, look, you know, I personally don't use Excel. Can you go to Microsoft and you can save some money on my license? I don't need Excel. Don't pay them for Excel for me. And the CIO just looked at his CEO like, you sweet summer child, that, that is not a thing.

Sarah Holder (13:54)

With the benefit of hindsight, how important was Excel in turning Microsoft into the company that it is today.

Max Chaffkin (14:01)

I mean, I think there's no Microsoft, the $4 trillion, almost $4 trillion market cap company that like, dominates the business software market without Excel.

Sarah Holder (14:14)

In four decades, Excel has managed to conquer the corporate world and seep into our culture. But it's no longer the only game in town. The challenges to Excel's dominance? That's coming up next.

Max Chaffkin (14:31)

You're surrounded by municipal bonds. Picture the commute to work.

Sarah Holder (14:35)

You may drive by your daughter's middle school, the local hospital, the toll road.

Max Chaffkin (14:39)

That leads to the airport. Chances are those projects were financed by munis and each had its own complicated structure. It sounds overwhelming, but Cormac Cullen, a portfolio manager at Fidelity, believes that this fragmentation can actually be an advantage for active managers. You can break with the herd and find the mispriced security. Benchmarking is just a passive sampling of the wide array of issuers in our market. But we're looking for the stone that hasn't been overturned and picked up and looked at in a municipal market worth $4 trillion and counting, investors will want to turn over as many stones as they can. Learn more@Bloomberg.com focused insights sponsored by Fidelity.

Max Chaffkin (15:31)

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half of price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Sarah Holder (15:54)

Payment of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only.

Max Chaffkin (15:58)

Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks.

Sarah Holder (15:59)

Busy taxes and fees extra.

Max Chaffkin (16:00)

See mintmobile.com Tired of juggling sales tools or spending hours on prospecting just to book a few meetings? Meet Apollo, the go to market platform for finding leads, connecting with buyers and closing deals all in one place. Apollo gives you access to over 210 million contacts and AI that handles all your busywork, finding leads, drafting emails and even prioritizing your day. So stop paying for five different sales tools when one does it all. Visit Apollo I.O. and sign up free today.

Sarah Holder (16:34)

When Microsoft Excel was first released in 1985, it built on the work of early digital spreadsheet programs like VisiCalc and Lotus. And pretty much since then, Excel has been synonymous with spreadsheets. But Bloomberg's Dina Bass says that hasn't stopped other companies from trying to compete with it, like Google, which introduced Google Sheets in 2006.

Dina Bass (16:59)

Several people we spoke to including Ray Ozzie, who after his time at Lotus actually ended up at Microsoft on their cloud strategy, said to us, look, people thought, we thought Sheets was going to and just Google's Office competitors in general were going to be the thing that took out Excel, but it just never really happened. And look, I mean Google does have a number of their Office competitor is particularly strong in schools. Most kids when they go to school they get a Chromebook and it comes with the Google applications. And so you end up with a generation of people that are growing up not using Office but instead using the Google rivals. And so there has been this question I think for the last 10 years or so about what would happen when those folks hit the workforce. But we're still really not seeing a mass migration away from Office. It seems like when you hit the workforce you get assigned your Office license.

Sarah Holder (17:55)

So far Excel has managed to fend off its free cloud based competitor, but now it's also confronting another big technological shift. I have to ask, what about AI? What kind of threat does AI pose to Excel?

Max Chaffkin (18:11)

So if you think like at the furthest remove, the promise of AI is it's going to take a large amount of data of information and allow you to ask questions of it and get answers in an easy way. And that's like what a spreadsheet does. And so there are lots of potential Excel competitors. There are sort of like AI versions of Excel. There are these kind of like AI tools that are designed essentially to work with Excel. But like part of the problem is that these AI tools are really just either copycats of Excel, like they're sort of just like doing exactly what Excel does, or they're just little pieces that are designed to work with Excel. So it's like an AI assistant that will spit out a spreadsheet, but that spreadsheet ends up being an Excel file. But then there's other issue with AI, which is like AI is not great at math. Like just the, like, just like the most basic Excel function is like sum, like add up a big long list of numbers. And like large language models are not awesome at computation because like they're going for approximation, not the, not the perfect answer. And then the other thing is AI models are really bad at like, at telling you why they arrived at a given answer. And that is a thing that spreadsheets are awesome at.

Sarah Holder (19:27)

And Dina says that even some of the AI products that are aiming to replace Excel still rely on spreadsheets to manage their data.

Dina Bass (19:36)

What people are trying to do is not reinvent the Underlying spreadsheet layer. It's basically create a copilot or an assistant that works on top of the data in the spreadsheet and answers questions for you. Now Microsoft, of course, is trying to do the same thing with their copilot.

Max Chaffkin (19:53)

And so even if you're using an AI algorithm to generate a spreadsheet, my guess is it's going to spit it out and you're going to be right back in Microsoft Excel just like your parents and maybe even your grandparents were.

Sarah Holder (20:05)

Max says there might be something deeper at play here, something intangible that's kept people coming back to Excel year after year.

Max Chaffkin (20:13)

Maybe there is something fundamental to a spreadsheet that like, we wouldn't actually want to process data in another way. That like, really this is just like a table of numbers. Like I said, people have been using tables of numbers for a very long time.

Sarah Holder (20:27)

Yeah, if it was good enough for Mesopotamia.

Max Chaffkin (20:29)

Yeah, it's like it's how Steve Ballmer's brain works. Maybe it's how all of our brains work in some sense. And like the, the prospect of trying to reinvent that, it doesn't make that much sense. Which is why, like Dina said, like, Microsoft strategy is not to make an AI version of Excel. It's just to have like an assistant inside of Excel. That, and this is, you know, barring the language that Microsoft executives use when they talk about it, but it's basically like they want to make you as good as the world champion. Three, two, one. And we're done. Wow. So you watch those world champions on tv, you're really impressed, you're thrilled. A huge Congratulations to our 2025 Microsoft Excel World champion. Dermid early and now you, with the help of Copilot, can do the same kinds of advanced modeling that they do. I don't think it's quite there yet, but that's the promise.

Sarah Holder (21:30)

This is the big take from Bloomberg News News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from the big take and unlimited access to all of bloomberg.com, subscribe today@bloomberg.com podcastoffer thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

Max Chaffkin (21:51)

JBL wireless earbuds are for those who are the first to try something unique. The first wireless earbuds on the market with a touchscreen case which allows you to control your audio without reaching for your phone. They also have a touchscreen smart charging case for one touch control. I love being able to touch my buds and control the volume with a built in wireless transmitter that lets you plug and play with any device you want. JBL Wireless Earbuds connects you to all your favorite music, movies and games. JBL Wireless Earbuds Grab a pair@jbl.com okay, so there's nice and there's luxury.

Dina Bass (22:26)

The Delta 1 experience is all about luxury.

Max Chaffkin (22:30)

It's the extra touches and personalization. If you've experienced it, you know. If you haven't, well, you deserve to. You deserve to relax in the comfort.

Dina Bass (22:40)

Of Delta One lounges. You need to enjoy the chef curated meals during flights and the comfort of.

Max Chaffkin (22:47)

Spacious 180 degree lie flat seats. If there's one thing I know, it's.

Dina Bass (22:52)

That everyone needs to experience Delta One. Learn more about the Delta One Experience.

Max Chaffkin (22:58)

At delta.com deltaone Amazon Five Star Theater.

Sarah Holder (23:03)

Presents Real customer reviews Performed by Eva Longoria. Tonight's sports briefs.

Max Chaffkin (23:11)

Oh boy, where do I even start with these performance mesh boxer briefs. These boxer briefs are like a magician's trick.

Sarah Holder (23:21)

You know the one where you go, where did that rabbit come from?

Max Chaffkin (23:24)

So if you're looking for underwear that not only performs well, but also gives.

Sarah Holder (23:28)

Your package the attention it deserves, then look no further. 5 stars. Nickalicious Shop the perfect gift this holiday season on Amazon.