If Excel hosted a 40th birthday party today, nearly every CFO would expect an invitation.
Whether they came up through accounting, FP&A, banking or corporate development, every CFO has a relationship with Excel that runs deeper than any other software. To many, it’s a toolkit, a security blanket and an objective organizer of data.
For four decades now, Microsoft’s humble grid of cells has powered financial models, budget forecasts and late-night sessions in finance departments across the world. While technology around it has evolved at lightning speed, Excel has quietly adapted and endured, outlasting trends and earning a permanent seat in the CFO tech stack.
A peek back in time
Excel debuted on Sept. 30,1985 for the Macintosh, beating Lotus 1-2-3 to the punch on Windows two years later. By the mid-1990s, it had become the undisputed standard for corporate finance. Over the decades, Microsoft layered in features like pivot tables, Visual Basic macros and Power Query, keeping Excel relevant as finance functions globalized and digitized. Today, it’s embedding AI copilots and connecting to cloud ERPs.
The foundation of finance
Excel’s origin story in corporate finance isn’t just about functionality. It’s about identity. For many CFOs, it was the first real tool that gave them power over numbers, along with the ability to visualize and articulate them.
Nitesh Sharan, CFO of SoundHound AI, remembers the early days vividly. “Excel has been foundational to the finance profession,” he said. “Along with my old HP-12C calculator, it’s one of the tools that defined my early career.” As a young treasury professional, he said he even used Visual Basic inside Excel to run complex trading simulations, something no other software could handle at the time.
That flexibility shaped how finance teams thought. Sharan recalled hosting “So What Meetings” — sessions held after weeks of model-building — to figure out what the numbers actually meant. “The challenge with Excel has always been that too much time is spent creating and formatting, and not enough time is spent on the ‘so what,’” he said.
“Excel has been foundational to the finance profession. Along with my old HP-12C calculator, it’s one of the tools that defined my early career.”
Nitesh Sharan
CFO of SoundHound AI
For some CFOs, Excel’s 40th birthday hits closer to home. Ying Miao, CFO of Converge, laughed when she learned about Excel’s 40-year mark.
“I’m going to tell my team that it is [around] the same age as me,” she said. Miao added that she used it from her first college internship through every stage of her career. “Even today, I’d say 70 to 80% of what we do is still in Excel. I think in the next five years that number might go down to 50% or even 30%, but I don’t see it fully going away because of technology like different forms of AI.”
Excel’s enduring consistency
Excel’s continued dominance is about universality. CFOs say now, it’s often the only tool that everyone on the team, from finance analysts to operations managers to board members, can use and understand.
Miao sees this daily. “The beauty of Excel is that it can be both complex and simple,” she said. “You can build advanced models or just open a sheet and jot notes. Very few tools have that range. And everyone knows it. Finance people, non-finance people, it’s universal.”
Joseph Goren, CFO of cleaning products brand The Pink Stuff, watched Excel overtake Lotus 1-2-3 and never looked back. “When I was in college, it was Lotus 1-2-3, and nobody really knew what to do with it except for [that] one project you had to finish. I wish I knew Excel then the way I do now,” he said.
“Excel adapts. It’s been the flexible standard for decades. It won’t look the same in 10 years, but it will still be the primary business tool.”
Eric Mason
CFO of CLA
Goren praised the developers of Excel and the software’s adaptability to the changing demands of finance over time. “Pivot tables are incredible. You can take a massive amount of data and summarize it in seconds. People who aren’t used to it are amazed. It saves time, improves accuracy and makes data so much more usable. Whoever invented Excel should get a Nobel Prize; I believe it’s that important for the amount of work it saves. Even with all the new tools out there, Excel is still essential.”
Still, even its most loyal users recognize the cracks. Miao is pushing her team toward more centralized platforms to fix version control and communication issues. “Our board remembers numbers they saw once and wants to know why they’ve changed,” she said. “With Excel, files get lost, different versions float around, it’s messy. So we’re looking at tools that work with our ERP and act as a single repository. It’s not cheap, but it gives me one source of truth. That’s the trade-off: Excel is cheap, these newer tools aren’t.”
The future
For CFOs looking ahead, it looks like Excel isn’t disappearing; it’s evolving into something new. Rather than being replaced, it’s becoming a connective layer between human decision-making and increasingly intelligent systems, an idea that isn’t so new in the context of the relationship between finance and IT since 1985.
“Excel will still be dominant,” said Eric Mason, CFO of client accounting and advisory services for state and local government at CLA. He sees the software thriving alongside emerging technologies rather than being displaced by them. “It integrates beautifully with AI, whether it’s ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini. My background is in R and SQL, but Excel democratizes coding. VLOOKUP, IF statements, NPV functions, CSV transfers — Excel convinces non-coders they can code.”
Mason believes its strength lies in its adaptability. “Ninety-nine percent of business operations are still referencing cells, referencing data and doing arithmetic,” he said. “Excel adapts. It’s been the flexible standard for decades. It won’t look the same in 10 years, but it will still be the primary business tool.”
Sharan said that view resonates with him, framing Excel’s survival as a question of evolution. “If Excel continues to evolve toward being conversational, toward surfacing insights automatically, it will remain vital,” he said. “If not, other platforms will step into that gap. But I believe spreadsheets as an organizing principle will always matter. The key is ensuring the time we spend is on decisions and insights, not on formatting and formulas.”
After four decades, Excel isn’t just software. It’s a shared language, a bridge between eras of finance and a tool CFOs can’t quite quit just yet. At 40, like many CFOs who have hit that mark would say, it is at the height of its potential. And, like many other finance leaders out there, its future will be determined by how it incorporates its current function into a new technology landscape dominated by AI.
