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?
Why businesses still run on spreadsheets
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.
Excel came out in September 1985, on the Macintosh. By May 1996 Microsoft said 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 Microsoft knows what it is now. Forty years on, they're still adding their newest AI features to it.
The biggest study of what employers ask for is a bit old now. In 2014 Burning Glass went through nearly eight million middle-skill job adverts from a single year and found spreadsheets and word processing were a basic requirement in 78% of them.
So what has happened in the twelve years since? Two newer sources disagree. 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 right, they're just counting different jobs. Lightcast covers every kind of job across fifteen countries. ITJobsWatch only covers IT roles in the UK, where Excel was never the main skill anyway. So there isn't one number for how much Excel is needed today, and if someone gives you one, check which jobs they counted.
What Excel is actually used for
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 turned into the main record for something, because it was quicker than asking for a new field somewhere else.
That last one is where problems start. No one plans to run part of the business from a spreadsheet, it just happens because the spreadsheet was already open. Keeping that list clean, and working out whose job that is, is covered in Cleaning data: what it means, and who ends up doing it.
The three levels of Excel
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.
Even VLOOKUP has changed. Microsoft has since released XLOOKUP, which does the same job and can look left as well as right. But it isn't in Excel 2016 or 2019, so if your company is on one of those, you'll still need VLOOKUP.
So what does it mean to be proficient?
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. But the bit that counts most is knowing roughly what the numbers should say before you open the file, like noticing a total is wrong because it's about double last month's. You can learn the formulas in an afternoon. That part takes years in the job.
The people who were sure they were fine
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.
Errors turned up in 11% of spreadsheets in the largest audit, and in 86 to 91% in the most thorough ones.
The gap between 11% and 91% comes down to how hard the auditors looked. The more carefully they checked, the more errors they found.
Now look at the last row. Before any checking, the people who built the spreadsheets put the chance of an error in their own work at 10%. Every audit found more than that, and the most thorough ones found errors in nearly nine out of ten.
One of the best known spreadsheet failures happened here in the UK. 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. It wasn't a problem with anyone's Excel skills. The file format was just too old for the amount of data going through it.
So is the spreadsheet warrior dying?
No. Spreadsheets are still how data gets from one system to another when the two don't connect. CRMs export to CSV, data providers send you spreadsheets, and finance systems export to a grid. People still email spreadsheets to each other because it's the one format everyone can open. And plenty of businesses, especially older ones, still run on them, even though they know the alternatives exist.
People have been predicting the end of the spreadsheet for as long as there have been products sold to replace it. The one doing the rounds at the moment is Gartner's: by 2026, more than 70% of finance organizations will have moved off spreadsheets as their main planning tool. But look at what it actually says. It's about one department, finance, doing one job, planning, and only about which tool they use first. And 2026 is this year.
It's the same every time. Someone predicts the next thing will replace spreadsheets, the date comes, and people are still using them. What is changing is how much of the work you do by hand. The AI now built into spreadsheets is good at the tedious bits, like writing a formula, and bad at the part that takes experience, like spotting that a total looks wrong. It also brings a new problem: when it makes up a value, it looks just like a real one.
So no, the spreadsheet warrior isn't dying. The boring parts of the job are slowly getting automated, and what's left is the part you were hired for.
Handing over the repetitive part
Spreadsheets are great for fixing a big file in one go. They're not great when you're doing the same fix every month, by hand, from memory, with no record of what you changed. That's the part we built Operelio for. You can remove duplicates, merge files and clean up headers in one pass, and you get a report of what changed, with any removed rows kept in their own file. All of that is free to use, and How to remove duplicates in Excel walks through it step by step. You still decide what needs fixing, you just don't have to do it by hand every month.
It doesn't replace anyone either. A tool doesn't know what your numbers should add up to, so someone who knows the business still has to check what comes back.
So keep Excel on your CV. Everyone else has it on theirs and nobody checks. Just know that what makes you good at it is spotting the total that looks wrong, and that skill, like the spreadsheet, isn't going anywhere.
Originally published on the Operelio blog. What's the worst spreadsheet error you've caught, or missed?
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