Is the spreadsheet warrior a dying breed?

Love it or hate it, Excel is one of those skills everyone claims to be proficient in on their CV. No one checks what it even means, but it feels weird not to have it there, like people will assume you look at a spreadsheet like it's a Martian landing in your garden. So why is it so important to businesses to be proficient with Excel?

It's because pretty much every business at any level uses spreadsheets in some form. Spreadsheets have been the backbone of a lot of businesses, and moving away from the spreadsheet culture is difficult when it's all some people have known since its creation.

That creation was September 1985, on the Macintosh. By May 1996 Microsoft was telling anyone who'd listen that more than 30 million people were using it, which works out at about five new users a minute for eleven years. They haven't published a number since, so nobody outside the company knows what it is now. What you can see is that forty years on, they're still building their newest AI features into the same grid.

The broadest count of what employers actually ask for was taken a while ago. Burning Glass read nearly eight million middle-skill job adverts across a single year and found spreadsheets and word processing were a baseline requirement in 78% of them. That's 2014 data, so don't read it as today.

So what has happened in the twelve years since? Two current measures point in different directions. Lightcast, which is Burning Glass under a new name, still has Excel as the second most in-demand digital skill across fifteen countries, behind Microsoft Office itself, and mentions of the 365 suite it sits inside grew 195% in a year. ITJobsWatch, which counts UK IT vacancies rather than all of them, has Excel in 2.27% of permanent ads in the six months to September 2026, down from 4.76% a year earlier, with its rank sliding from 43rd to 69th.

Both are real, and they're counting different rooms. One spans fifteen countries and is not limited to IT. The other is IT roles in Britain, where Excel was never the point of the job anyway. If you want a single number for how much the world needs Excel today, there isn't one, and anybody who hands you one has picked the room that suits them.

Five jobs cover most of it:

• Transferring and storing data, like contact lists or engagement rates.
• Finance modelling and forecasting.
• Reporting. The weekly numbers somebody pulls, tidies and pastes into a deck.
• Reconciliation. Two exports side by side, and the job is finding what doesn't match.
• The list that quietly became a system of record, because it was quicker than asking for a field to be added to something else.

That last one is where the trouble starts. Nobody sits down and decides to run part of the business out of a spreadsheet. It happens because the spreadsheet was already open and the alternative was a meeting. What happens to that list afterwards, and whose job it is to keep it straight, is the subject of Cleaning data: what it means, and who ends up doing it.

On the surface, Excel is a list function with copy and pasting data from one point to another. The level above that is using Excel to interpret data, such as building graphs. The advanced level is summarizing it, which is what a pivot table does, and projecting forward from it, which is what FORECAST and TREND are for. So how do you do this? Excel has basic functions like removing duplicates or find and replace. Take it up a step and you're into VLOOKUP territory.

VLOOKUP is the clearest illustration of what proficiency means in practice. Microsoft has shipped XLOOKUP, which does the same job and will look in either direction rather than only left to right. It isn't in Excel 2016 or Excel 2019, so if you're on either of those you can't use it whatever you know about it. Knowing which function your version actually has is worth more than knowing the name of the newer one.

Does it mean you know how to copy and paste or delete rows? How to do a formula? This is where users go wrong. High level Excel is a skill which is highly valuable to learn, and is why many people attach skilled in Excel to their CVs.

Being proficient in Excel means knowing your way round a spreadsheet and pulling data out of it. The part underneath that, and the part nobody puts on a CV because there's no name for it, is knowing what the data is supposed to say before you open the file. You're doing the job the moment you notice a total is wrong because it's roughly double last month's. You can learn the keystrokes in an afternoon. You can't learn that in one.

There's a body of research on this, and it isn't comfortable reading if you've got Excel on your CV. Ray Panko at the University of Hawaii spent years collecting the results of audits on real working spreadsheets, rather than what the people who built them said about their own work.

The spread between those numbers is the point. The harder anybody looked, the more they found, so the honest answer to how many spreadsheets have errors in them is that it depends entirely on how hard you're willing to look.

The row worth sitting with is the last one. Asked in advance, spreadsheet developers put the odds of an error in their own work at 10%. Every audit came back above that, and the careful ones came back eight times above it. Nobody sitting in that gap thought they were the problem.

The best documented spreadsheet failure of the last decade happened in the UK, and it wasn't a skill failure either. Between 25 September and 2 October 2020, Public Health England lost 15,841 positive covid test results. The results were being passed between systems as .XLS files, the format Excel used before 2007, which stops at 65,536 rows. Everything past that row got dropped without anybody being told. Around 48,000 people who'd been in contact with a positive case were never called. Nobody involved was bad at Excel. They were pushing 2020 volumes through a file format from 2003.

No. And the evidence for that is mostly in what hasn't happened.

Spreadsheets are how your data crosses between systems that don't talk to each other. Every CRM exports to CSV. Every data provider hands you a spreadsheet. Every finance system has an export button and the thing it gives you is a grid. People still email each other spreadsheets, because it's the one format both ends can definitely open. Plenty of businesses, older ones especially, run on them outright, and not because nobody's mentioned the alternatives.

People have been predicting the end of the spreadsheet for about as long as there have been things sold to replace it, and every one of those predictions has the same shape. Gartner's is the one currently doing the rounds as proof that spreadsheets are dying: by 2026, more than 70% of finance organizations will have moved off spreadsheets as their primary planning tool. Read it again. Primary, planning, finance. It's a forecast about which tool one department opens first, for one task. And the year it names is the one we're in.

That's the pattern. Nobody counts spreadsheets and finds them gone. Somebody forecasts that the next thing will take over, the date arrives, and the grid is still there. What is actually changing is which half of the job you do by hand. The AI that's turned up in spreadsheets is good at exactly the part that was always tedious and weak at the part that was always the skill. It'll write the formula. It won't tell you the total looks wrong. And it brings a problem of its own, because a value it invented looks identical to a value it found.

So no, the warrior isn't dying. The boring half of the job is, slowly, and what's left is the half you were hired for.

This is where we come in, and it's not by telling you your skill is finished.

A spreadsheet is the right place to fix forty thousand rows in one go. What it isn't is a good place to do that same fix every month, by hand, from memory, with no record of what you changed. That's the part worth handing over, and it helps two kinds of people.

• If you are the spreadsheet warrior. You already know what needs doing. How to remove duplicates in Excel and How to merge two Excel files without copy and paste are the same jobs done in one pass, with a report of what was changed and the removed rows kept as their own file. The judgement is still yours. The ninth repetition of it isn't.
• If you never wanted to learn it. You shouldn't need VLOOKUP to get a usable list. How to clean a customer list without Excel formulas is that job without a single formula in it, and How to clean up messy column headers is the one that makes a file importable in the first place.

None of that needs a paid plan. Health Check, deduplicate, merge and clean headers are free to use, which covers everything described above. What you pay for is verifying email addresses properly and sending the result somewhere, both of which start on Starter, and the pricing page sets out where the line falls.

None of it makes anybody redundant. A tool has no idea what your numbers ought to come to, and it isn't going to work that out on its own. Somebody who knows the business still has to look at what comes back and decide whether it's right.

So put it on your CV. Everyone else does and nobody's checking. Just know that the bit worth claiming isn't the VLOOKUP, it's that you'd have spotted the total was wrong. That part isn't going anywhere, and neither is the spreadsheet, whatever gets forecast next.