Microsoft Excel, every mention
57 scenes · ← back to Microsoft Excel
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 106Toni Cowan-Brown 5Bernadette Kevins 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft Excel comes up
AI deployment
- ▶ 11:05 Benedict Evans You've probably never even seen Excel, for God's sake, and you think that the world is just going to change completely in 18 months, and so then you think, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:32 Benedict Evans Some of them do in some narrow specific places, like will I still do that in SAP or will, because it's too hard to do it in Excel, maybe now I can do it in flawed.
- ▶ 24:44 Benedict Evans You unbundle Excel, you unbundle email, you unbundle Google and SAP and the Salesforce and Workday, and then you turn, and very often, and you turn them into a new bundle, and you identify tasks or projects or problems that people didn't…
Most people and companies aren't tool-builders
- ▶ 5:31 Benedict Evans So I think the, well, I think the answer to that, and this kind of comes back to the counter argument to all this, is how many, like, 50 person company departments run on a 10 meg Excel file? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:08 Benedict Evans It was great, but that didn't replace every other piece of software or neither did Excel. 4 times in the scene
Token pricing
- ▶ 18:48 Benedict Evans And Microsoft had to get everybody to switch from WordPerfect and Lotus One, Two, Three, and all the other spreadsheets that were floating around to use Office and Excel, to use Word and Excel. 2 times in the scene
What jobs are AI jobs?
- ▶ 15:19 Benedict Evans As you go through adding machines and computers and mainframes and PCs and Excel and ERPs and SAS, you get wave after wave of automation and the number of accountants keeps going up.
AI and SaaS
- ▶ 7:32 Benedict Evans And then you've got the middle case of Excel and Google sheets and email, where like we don't, haven't got a dedicated tool to do that thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:29 Benedict Evans I say this as somebody who hasn't written code except for Excel in 20 years.
The AI presentation
- ▶ 24:21 Benedict Evans He said that half of his jobs were telling people who used Excel to use the database, and the other half were telling people who used the database to use Excel. 5 times in the scene
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 10:53 Benedict Evans One of them is what you get when you open these apps, is the same thing that you get if you do file new in Excel or PowerPoint, which is a bunch of suggestions.
- ▶ 19:44 Benedict Evans Um, this is, I was looking at Claude this morning, and it, Claude have a, um, the Anthropics have an announcement of Claude for Claude for Financial Services, and one of the bits of marketing copy is, like, it scores 83% on a benchmark for… 4 times in the scene
Looking for AI strategies
- ▶ 2:13 Benedict Evans To solve some problem inside big companies to unbundle something out of Excel, Salesforce, email, Oracle, um, whatever, um, solve some point solution.
Ai eats the world
- ▶ 17:03 Benedict Evans You couldn't put Excel in a browser in 95. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:22 Benedict Evans Some of it will be people will work out a way that they can do something, unbundle some task out of Salesforce and turn it into a new company, or unbundle some process out of Oracle, or out of Excel, or out of email and make it a new…
Looking for AI use-cases
- ▶ 3:20 Toni Cowan-Brown In Excel, go back to my first point.
- ▶ 17:48 Benedict Evans So yes, you do have four or 500 different software applications, and the reason I mention this is that all of those are basically doing stuff you could do with X, some Excel, email, Salesforce, or Oracle, or PowerPoint. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:03 Benedict Evans Purple thing with some stars on it, and you click on that, and something happens, or you're in LinkedIn, or you're in Excel, or whatever it is, and so this stuff just kind of appears anyway, and now at least that's not,
Apple's Vision Pro
- ▶ 2:24 Benedict Evans You know, it's preposterous, but you can open Excel and open a spreadsheet and it looks as good or better as it will look on your 3000 dollar five K screen on your desk. 2 times in the scene
What's your AI strategy?
- ▶ 12:22 Benedict Evans I mean, I was listening to a, um, podcast with Steven Sinofsky from, I mentioned sometimes who I used to work with, who used to run Office, and he's got stories of going, literally going to investment banks with PCs, showing them Excel,…
AI and Everything Else
- ▶ 8:53 Benedict Evans So, like, you can't just use Excel. 2 times in the scene
Bundling/Unbundling AI
- ▶ 4:44 Benedict Evans And I thought that is exactly like what happens if you do file new in Word or Excel or Keynote or, I don't know, InDesign or Logic or Final Cut or any of those kind of applications. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:30 Benedict Evans Um, and so if you go back to, um, to Excel, 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:40 Benedict Evans So the way I always used to describe this years ago was that, you know, every big company, there's, there's people who download every week, you download a CSV out of SAP, and you put it in Excel, and you analyze it and sort it, and you… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:47 Toni Cowan-Brown And to your point, most of the political parties were very happy keeping all of this in an Excel spreadsheet.
Unbundling ChatGPT
- ▶ 2:54 Benedict Evans And then secondly, which is what I was talking when we were just chatting is if you do file new in Excel or logic or keynote, you'll get a list of suggestions. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:48 Benedict Evans And, and, and kind of going back to looking at, you know, looking at ChatGPT as Excel, which is kind of, you know, so you can also actually compare it to Twitter, like you've got a blank screen in a box, what do you type?
- ▶ 10:24 Benedict Evans And it says we don't have an Excel yet.
- ▶ 15:40 Benedict Evans And, but what they said was they were consultant and half their jobs were telling people he used Excel to use a database and the other half were the other way around. 2 times in the scene
Vision Pro, two weeks on
- ▶ 20:00 Benedict Evans I don't think the future of productivity is seeing more columns in Excel.
Working out AI questions
- ▶ 29:28 Benedict Evans You could almost go straight to Excel and say, is it a good idea to go to open Excel 2 times in the scene
ChatGPT versus Google
- ▶ 30:38 Benedict Evans Will I be able to tell the difference running Keynote and a web browser and email and Excel?
Generative AI
- ▶ 23:12 Benedict Evans You've given it an Excel formula, effectively, um, which means it's actually, you know, you see that it makes some kind of, it's hilarious to have people saying, oh, this is going to destroy creativity.
How many metaverses?
- ▶ 9:18 Benedict Evans So you don't do Excel on your phone. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:02 Benedict Evans And the direction of travel of software is not that I should see 200 fields in Salesforce at once, or that I should see 300 columns in Excel, and then I'll be able to work more productively.
- ▶ 25:44 Benedict Evans And the same thing here, and the idea that there's just kind of one standard that, like, it's like saying that Excel and Photoshop have to be interoperable. 3 times in the scene
Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust
- ▶ 2:20 Benedict Evans But another whole piece of future work is how much do you unbundle Excel, Salesforce, email, um, Oracle, SAP?
- ▶ 5:06 Benedict Evans And so Excel and word, you know, lawyers still use word financial analysts all still use Excel. 2 times in the scene
The future of Twitter
- ▶ 3:54 Benedict Evans Um, I always used to describe it, it's a bit like opening Excel, like you've got this empty blank canvas, and what do you do?
The Evolution of networks
- ▶ 18:22 Benedict Evans It's sort of like saying, you know, I should have a different spreadsheet app with different features that could open my Excel file. 3 times in the scene
What we know about web 3 so far
- ▶ 24:30 Benedict Evans Will OpenOffice replace Excel?
'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- ▶ 5:52 Benedict Evans And it's not that you move from Excel to Google Sheets.
- ▶ 9:14 Benedict Evans And you would say, well, I know there's an Excel file that said something, but I'm which folder is it in and I won't be able to find it.
- ▶ 10:39 Benedict Evans As an end user, I don't think that saying, here's an Excel sheet, I'm going to use Google Slides instead, and I'm going to tell people about it in Drive or in Docs or in Gmail is the answer. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:35 Benedict Evans It's just, it's one of many files and it, you know, it's an Excel file 2 times in the scene
The Business of publishing
- ▶ 10:14 Benedict Evans Type pasting stuff into Excel spreadsheets and then doing if statements to calculate the price.
Paying attention to Apple again
- ▶ 10:06 Benedict Evans I copied a chart in Excel on my Mac, opened WhatsApp,
Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps
- ▶ 16:45 Benedict Evans There was a joke that Excel was going to have stories, but the point is that there you've got this atomic, it's the current unit of content that's interesting.
Telling stories with charts
- ▶ 41:03 Benedict Evans Using CSVs into Excel, into Keynote.
There's no such thing as data
- ▶ 3:18 Toni Cowan-Brown And I just say, basically you're talking about a really big Excel sheet. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:08 Toni Cowan-Brown If I change a couple of Excel rows and I add a few columns, then it's no longer the votafile as it once was.
The history of doom-scrolling
- ▶ 40:36 Benedict Evans And every Excel template, like file new in Excel, like new invoice, new expense report, you know, all of those become, everything you see in the file new window in Excel became, becomes a billion dollar company. 2 times in the scene
Slack, Salesforce and the future of work
- ▶ 15:42 Bernadette Kevins So it was, it was Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Outlook.
- ▶ 24:20 Bernadette Kevins And equally, there's all the different things that unbundle Excel. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:36 Bernadette Kevins Like, you must be able to do that in Excel.
The paradox of Apple
- ▶ 11:17 Benedict Evans I mean, there's a small number of people running Excel and Photoshop, but you know, for four billion people out there who have a smartphone, it's their main computer.
- ▶ 24:31 Benedict Evans Do I use Excel? 4 times in the scene