Reports of Excel’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Every few quarters, someone declares that “Excel is dead.” The loudest voices usually come from vendors selling alternatives to finance teams, trying very hard to convince their investors and the world that spreadsheets should no longer be part of a modern toolkit.
Inside most finance teams, the reality is much quieter. Month-end still closes in Excel. Forecasts still get finished in Excel. Board decks still get reconciled in Excel. If Excel has died, its ghost is doing an impressive amount of work.
Recent analyses estimate that hundreds of millions to over a billion people use Excel worldwide, and around 1.2 billion people use Microsoft Office, with spreadsheets routinely described as the backbone of financial reporting. Within finance, the numbers are even more extreme. A 2024 survey by PayEm found that 86% of financial professionals still rely on Excel for budgeting and forecasting. An AutoRek payments study reported that spreadsheets remain integral to financial operations in 90% of organizations, much to the frustration of the authors. A 2025 FP&A–focused survey from the Association for Financial Professionals found that 96% of FP&A practitioners rely on Excel every single day.
Some tech vendors not only want you to believe Excel is obsolete; they need you to believe it, because their business depends on it. You can’t really blame them for trying. But if this is what “death” looks like, Excel is having a very strange afterlife. Velixo takes the opposite view: Excel is not something to be replaced, but something to be strengthened and connected.
The argument here is simple: the problem isn’t Excel. The problem is disconnected, unmanaged Excel.
For mid-market finance teams, the future isn’t about killing spreadsheets; it’s about connecting them properly to the systems of record they already rely on. Forcing finance teams to abandon the very core of their day-to-day work would be a fool’s errand.
Despite decades of investment in ERPs, BI tools, CPM suites, and “modern” planning platforms, spreadsheets remain the default environment where finance actually gets things done. Whether it’s month-end or quarter-end close, board and management reporting, budgeting and forecasting, or scenario planning and “what if” analysis, the last mile of finance work still lives in Excel.
CFO-focused media and analysts at firms like Gartner have started to push back on the “just move off Excel” narrative for exactly this reason. Spreadsheets persist because they work. They are uniquely good at handling the flexible, iterative questions finance teams face every week. When a vendor claims, “Excel is legacy” or “we’re replacing spreadsheets,” they are pushing uphill against the daily reality of the people they’re trying to sell to.
Where Excel really gets into trouble is not its age, but its isolation. Most Excel horror stories follow the same script. Data is exported from the ERP or other systems. That export gets copied, emailed, and dropped into shared folders. Each stakeholder adds their own tweaks, formulas, and assumptions. By the end, finance and IT are spending days reconciling which version is “real.” That’s not a story about Excel as a calculation engine; it’s a story about manual exports and offline files.
When spreadsheets sit outside the ERP and other systems of record, they turn into a parallel universe: there is no single source of truth, no centralized governance or security, no consistent audit trail, and a lot of manual reconciliation and late-night fire drills. Leaders are right to want to reduce that risk. The mistake is drawing a straight line from “spreadsheet chaos” to “Excel must die.” A more accurate framing is that unmanaged, offline spreadsheets are the problem, and connected, governed spreadsheets are part of the solution.
If spreadsheets were genuinely obsolete, usage would be collapsing. The data shows the opposite: a huge installed base, heavy daily use, and ongoing investment from Microsoft on top of its 1.2 billion–person user base. There are good reasons finance teams keep choosing Excel.
First, Excel offers flexibility for messy, real-world questions. ERP and BI tools are great for known, repeatable questions: standard reports, predefined dashboards, operational KPIs. Finance, however, lives in the land of “What if we cut this product line in one region?”, “How does this new headcount plan ripple through cash?”, and “Can we slice this P&L differently for the board next week?” Those questions rarely arrive fully defined. They evolve through conversation, iteration, and last-minute changes. Spreadsheets are built for this exploratory, model-first style of work. Add in purpose-built, live, connected functions for leading ERPs like Acumatica, Sage Intacct, Business Central, as well as construction software like STACK, Velixo makes that workflow seamless.
Second, there is enormous skill density in Excel. Between Office and Excel, we’re talking about a user base in the hundreds of millions, covering roughly 90% of businesses globally. For finance, Excel fluency is a basic requirement. Many professionals have spent years learning shortcuts, modeling patterns, and reporting tricks. Replacing that with an entirely new interface isn’t just a tooling decision; it’s a productivity tax that gets paid every time someone changes jobs and must relearn not only a new company, but a new system. Velixo is built with that reality in mind: finance teams are lean, deadlines are tight, and asking them to pay that tax for every new platform is simply not realistic.
Third, Excel is ubiquitous across the broader ecosystem. Files are accepted by auditors, lenders, board members, and external advisors. Workbooks slot naturally into Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and PowerPoint without asking anyone to adopt yet another platform just to review numbers. Auditors want to be able to drilldown and won’t always accept a simple PDF as enough. The harder it is to verify, the more painful the audit process will be.
Finally, Excel is not “legacy software” in the sense of being frozen in time. Microsoft is investing heavily in its evolution. Power Query and Power Pivot bring sophisticated, in-memory analytics into the spreadsheet environment. Dynamic array functions simplify models that once required dense, tangled formulas. Copilot and other AI capabilities are being layered on top to help users explore, summarize, and model faster. And the Office Add-Ins platform is more vibrant than ever, enabling modern connectivity options such as Velixo. That is not what sunset looks like; it is what strategic investment looks like.
So why the insistence that Excel must go? In many cases, “Excel is dead” is less an honest prediction and more a positioning trick. It sets up a false binary: either you are a modern, forward-thinking finance team using some vendor’s platform, or you’re stuck in the past with spreadsheets. Reality is far messier. Companies deploy BI tools for dashboards, then still export to Excel for deeper analysis and board prep. ERP reporting handles standard views but cannot keep up with the ad hoc questions that drive real-time decision-making. Planning platforms centralize models, but local budget owners still insist on Excel templates because that’s where they actually know how to work.
For most mid-market organizations, insisting everyone “get out of Excel” is not transformation. It’s wishful thinking dressed up as a strategy. A more realistic approach keeps Excel as a primary interface where it adds value, moves organizational data, logic, and security back into governed systems like the ERP, general ledger, or data models, and connects Excel to those systems in a controlled, near real-time way. In other words: don’t rip out Excel. Connect it. That’s the design principle behind Velixo.
“Connected Excel” is not just a slogan. In a healthy spreadsheet ecosystem, workbooks pull data directly from the ERP or data model on refresh. There are no CSVs bouncing around, no copy-and-paste chains, no “v7_final_FINAL_really.xlsx” files clogging shared drives. That alone removes a huge chunk of reconciliation work and version confusion.
In that environment, even if dozens of reports exist in Excel, they all reference a single governed chart of accounts, consistent dimensions, and shared business rules in the ERP or modeling layer. When those structures change, the changes flow through. Governance and security live at the data layer, with row-level and role-based access controlled centrally rather than enforced through hidden rows and protected cells. Audit trails are possible. Sensitive information isn’t drifting through inboxes and desktops in uncontrolled files.
Standardized templates play a role too. Finance can define and distribute official P&L, cash flow, and variance analysis templates that pull live data for everyone. Local teams still have room to think and explore, but the core structure remains stable. In some scenarios, it even makes sense to let users rely on preset templates rather than re-keying everything into a browser form. rather than re-keying everything into a browser form.
At that point, Excel stops acting like a shadow system and starts acting like what it really wants to be: a flexible, familiar front end sitting on top of a solid, governed financial backbone.
When finance leaders encounter claims that “Excel is dead” or “it’s time to say goodbye to spreadsheets,” it’s worth reading the fine print. Many of these arguments correctly highlight the risks of manual spreadsheets: errors, broken links, poor version control, and weak auditability. Where they go too far is leaping to the conclusion that the only credible response is to replace Excel entirely.
A more pragmatic lens is to ask whether a tool will actually reduce dependence on offline, manually maintained spreadsheets or simply become another place to export from. Does it acknowledge that the team will still use Excel for some part of their work, and if so, how does it integrate? Can it coexist with a connected, governed spreadsheet strategy, or does it quietly assume an unrealistic ban on Excel? When a platform can’t answer those questions clearly, “Excel is dead” sounds less like a vision of the future and more like a sign that the vendor doesn’t really understand how finance teams operate.
Excel isn’t dead. Disconnected Excel should be.
Across the industry, the story is remarkably consistent: Excel and Office serve hundreds of millions to over a billion users. Around 86% of finance professionals still rely on Excel for budgeting and forecasting. Roughly 90% of organizations continue to use spreadsheets for critical finance processes. FP&A teams report everyday reliance on Excel as their primary analysis environment. At the same time, there is very real urgency around modernizing financial operations, tightening governance, and reducing spreadsheet-driven risk.
Those two realities are not in conflict. They point to the same conclusion. The spreadsheet as an unmanaged system of record has to go. The spreadsheet as a connected, governed interface is likely here to stay. For finance teams building their next-generation stack, the most durable strategy is not to declare Excel dead, but to kill disconnected Excel and then design an operating model where the tools people already know and trust are wired directly into the systems leadership needs to trust.
That is exactly the problem space Velixo focuses on: giving finance teams governed, real-time access to ERP data inside Excel, so they can keep working the way they want while the business finally gets the control and visibility it needs.