Excel

Microsoft Excel is the spreadsheet application in the Microsoft 365 Office apps. It's available on Windows, macOS, the web, iOS, and Android. Beyond cells and formulas, Excel includes pivot tables, charts, Power Query (for data import and transformation), Power Pivot (for modelling), and dynamic-array functions like XLOOKUP and LET. Workbooks stored in OneDrive or SharePoint support real-time co-authoring and rich sharing. Excel is the deepest tool in the Office suite, and for finance, analytics, and operations users it's often the primary working surface — bridged into Power BI and Power Automate for reporting and automation.

Worked example

A finance analyst pulls transaction exports from three different systems into Excel using Power Query, which cleans and merges the sources into a single table without a single manual copy-paste — and refreshes automatically when the source files update. A pivot table summarises the result by region and month, and an XLOOKUP pulls a matching budget figure from a separate reference sheet without the fragile column-position assumptions VLOOKUP requires. When the workbook needs to become a live dashboard other people check weekly rather than a static file that's emailed around, the natural next step is publishing the underlying model to Power BI rather than continuing to grow the same spreadsheet.

Common pitfalls

Building a workbook as a growing pile of manual formulas and copy-pasted data, rather than using Power Query for repeatable data import, is the single biggest source of "the numbers don't match last week's version" incidents — Power Query steps are auditable and repeatable, a manual paste isn't. Storing a single shared workbook as an email attachment invites the same version-conflict problem as Word, and Excel's real-time co-authoring only works once the file lives in OneDrive or SharePoint. And treating Excel as a database once a workbook has tens of thousands of rows, multiple relationships, and several people editing concurrently is a common overreach — that's the point at which Power BI or Dataverse is usually the better tool, not a bigger spreadsheet.