Excel

Excel is Microsoft's spreadsheet program and the tool that much of the business world uses for calculations and planning.

Automation & Productivity

What is Excel?

Excel is Microsoft's spreadsheet program and probably the most widely used business software overall. Calculations, budgets, analyses: A significant portion of business operations runs on Excel files.

Typical uses range from liquidity planning and price calculations to pivot analyses of sales data. Its strength lies in its depth: Power Query pulls data from databases and APIs, a single sheet holds up to 1,048,576 rows, and almost anything can be automated with VBA or Python.

Google Sheets is more pleasant for browser-based collaboration, but hits limits sooner with large datasets; Airtable structures relational data more cleanly. Excel's well-known risk: business-critical processes in sprawling, unversioned files that only one person understands.

Ideal for finance, controlling, and any ad-hoc analysis; basic knowledge is essential regardless. For team databases and processes, use Airtable or a proper database before the Excel file becomes a single point of failure. Recurring analyses are better moved to Power BI or Looker Studio.

Functions

  • Standard XLSX format, readable by virtually any company
  • Capacity of 1,048,576 rows per sheet
  • Copilot support for formulas and analysis (additional license)
  • Power Pivot and data models for BI tasks without additional software
  • Web and mobile versions, free to use in the browser
  • Spreadsheet with hundreds of functions for calculations
  • Pivot tables for analyzing large datasets
  • Charts and conditional formatting for reports
  • Power Query for importing data from databases, APIs, and files
  • Macros and VBA, up to Python in Excel
Automation & Productivity
Complexity
Intermediate

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