Every few years someone announces the death of the spreadsheet. A new tool, smarter and prettier, with a name that's a verb and a pricing page with three tiers. And every few years the spreadsheet outlives it.
There's something funny about the most-predicted death in software being the one that never arrives. The spreadsheet was supposed to be replaced by databases, then by SaaS dashboards, then by AI. Instead it sits there, a grid of empty cells, quietly running an enormous share of the actual work that gets done in the world.
The software that refuses to die
VisiCalc shipped in 1979. The basic idea — a grid, formulas, cells that update when their inputs change — has barely moved since. Estimates for how many people use Excel land somewhere between 750 million and over a billion, depending on who's counting and how. Google Sheets adds many millions more. Payroll runs on spreadsheets. Clinical trials are coordinated in them. National budgets pass through them. So do most people's household accounts and a fair number of weddings.
This is not because nobody has built anything better. Plenty of people have built things that are better at one specific job. It's that the spreadsheet is good enough at almost every job, and it asks nothing of you to start. You open it and there's a grid. You type. Nobody makes you create an account to add two numbers.
Why it actually works
The spreadsheet's real trick was never the formulas. It was the file.
A spreadsheet is a thing you own. It lives on your machine, or somewhere you put it. You can email it, copy it, rename it, back it up to a drive, open it in ten years on software that didn't exist when you made it. It does exactly what you tell it and nothing more. It has never once shown you an ad, suggested an upgrade, or sent a notification about your streak. The grid is honest in a way most modern software has quietly stopped being.
The spreadsheet's superpower was never the formulas. It was that the file belonged to you.
That honesty is why people trust it with the things that matter. When a number actually counts — money, medication, a deadline that has consequences — a surprising number of careful, capable people close the polished app and open a spreadsheet, because they want to see the whole thing in front of them and know that no one else is holding it.
What the spreadsheet gets wrong
This is a defence, not a love letter, so the flaws deserve their paragraph.
The spreadsheet is where personal tracking goes to die. The columns are set up beautifully on Sunday. By week five nobody has typed a number in. It's clumsy on a phone, which is where most of life now happens. It will happily let you overwrite a month of data with a stray paste and say nothing. It gives you total freedom and zero structure, and total freedom is precisely what makes a daily habit hard to keep. A blank grid is patient, but it isn't encouraging.
So when people abandon their tracking spreadsheets, they're usually right to. The problem was rarely the data and almost always the friction:
- Opening a desktop app to log one number you'll forget by lunch.
- A layout built for a laptop, used on a train.
- No gentle nudge, no sense of where you are, just rows.
- The quiet dread of a file you've already fallen behind on.
None of that is an argument against owning your data. It's an argument against making yourself do data entry the hard way.
The good parts, kept
The interesting question isn't whether spreadsheets will survive. They will. It's what you'd keep if you were designing something for one honest job, today, with the spreadsheet's virtues intact.
You'd keep the file. You'd keep the fact that it lives on the person's own device and answers to them. You'd keep the absence of accounts and servers and monthly invoices. And then you'd throw out the blank-grid friction: give it one screen, one job, a shape that fits a thumb, and just enough structure that logging today's number takes ten seconds and feels like progress rather than admin.
That's broadly what we make. The same bet the spreadsheet made in 1979 — that the most trustworthy place for your data is a file you hold — minus the part where you have to build the whole thing yourself and then keep showing up to a grid that doesn't care whether you do.
The spreadsheet had it right all along. It just never finished the job.
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