What Is Microsoft Excel?

A quick overview

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application developed by Microsoft. It lets you store data in rows and columns, run calculations with formulas, and turn raw numbers into charts, pivot tables, and reports.

First released in 1985, Excel is now part of the Microsoft 365 suite and runs on Windows, macOS, the web, iPad, and mobile. It's the most widely used spreadsheet program in the world and the de-facto standard for business reporting.

What you can do in Excel

Track and analyse data — from a household budget to a multi-million-row sales export.

Write formulas to calculate sums, averages, lookups, and complex conditional logic without writing code.

Visualise results with charts, sparklines, conditional formatting, and pivot tables.

Automate repeat work with macros (recorded VBA) and Office Scripts (modern JavaScript-based automation in Excel for the web).

Connect to external sources via Power Query and load them into refreshable tables.

Who uses Excel?

Almost every desk job touches Excel: finance teams build models, marketing teams clean exports, operations teams track inventory, HR teams manage rosters, and analysts prototype dashboards before moving to BI tools.

Outside the office, Excel is just as common for personal budgeting, side-project bookkeeping, fantasy-league stats, recipe scaling — anywhere a list of numbers needs a quick total.

How it compares to alternatives

Google Sheets is the closest free alternative and a strong choice for real-time collaboration. Apple Numbers is friendlier for one-off layouts but weaker for heavy formulas. LibreOffice Calc is a free open-source desktop option.

Excel still wins on advanced formulas (LET, LAMBDA, dynamic arrays), Power Query, pivot tables, and the depth of its ecosystem of templates, add-ins, and tutorials.

Getting started

If you don't already have Excel, you can use the free Office on the web at office.com with a Microsoft account. The desktop apps come with a Microsoft 365 subscription or a one-off Office Home & Student licence.

Once you're in, start small: type a few numbers into a column, click an empty cell below them, and try =SUM(A1:A5). You've just written your first formula — everything else is a variation on that idea.