We mapped US search demand for 1,008 spreadsheet templates — here's what people actually want

#datascience #excel #opendata #seo

People search for spreadsheet templates roughly 100,000 times a month in the US alone. While building an open catalog of Excel and Google Sheets templates, we compiled the search demand behind 1,008 template keywords — and the shape of that demand surprised us.

The dataset

We published the full dataset on Zenodo (CC BY 4.0): US Search Demand for Excel & Google Sheets Templates — 1,008 Keywords (2026). Each row: keyword, estimated monthly US volume, category, and — where one exists — a link to a free implementation of the template.

Three things the data shows

1. Demand is a long tail, not a head. The single biggest keyword we tracked ("excel schedule") pulls ~1,900 searches/month, but the median keyword pulls under 100. Half of all demand lives in keywords almost nobody optimizes for — which is exactly why generic "template gallery" sites dominate the head and ignore the tail.

2. Money tasks dominate. Bookkeeping, budgeting, invoicing and payroll categories together account for more search volume than all other categories combined. People don't search for pretty spreadsheets; they search for spreadsheets that move money correctly. That has a direct engineering consequence: formula correctness matters more than design. (Our own build pipeline runs every generated workbook through a formula-evaluation harness that asserts cell-level parity to the cent between the Excel and Google Sheets builds — because a broken SUM in a payroll sheet is not a cosmetic bug.)

3. "Free" queries convert to real intent. Keywords containing "free download" almost always have a top-5 dominated by email-gated PDFs or SaaS signup walls. There's a persistent gap between what searchers ask for (a file) and what ranks (a funnel). We've been filling that gap with a library of free, no-signup templates — each one a real .xlsx + Google Sheets pair, e.g. the bookkeeping & accounting set.

Reproducing the analysis

The Zenodo CSV loads straight into pandas:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("excel-template-search-demand-us-20260717.csv")
df.groupby("category")["monthly_search_volume_us"].sum().sort_values(ascending=False)