by Max Musing of Basedash
Every few years, someone declares the spreadsheet dead. Notion was going to kill it, then Airtable, then a hundred AI tools, and now agents are supposedly going to make it obsolete too.
But Excel is 40 years old and still runs most of the actual decisions at most actual companies. I'd bet it outlasts almost everything launching on this site this year, including a lot of stuff I love.
My theory on why: the spreadsheet got a few things exactly right and never had to walk them back.
- Instant feedback. You type, you see the result, no build step, no waiting.
- The grid is a universal format. Everyone already knows how to read one.
- It's a blank canvas. It doesn't assume what you're doing, so it never gets in your way.
The newer tools usually beat it on one axis (collaboration, AI, visualization) but lose on flexibility or familiarity, so people keep one foot in the spreadsheet anyway. I see this constantly. Teams have a slick tool for the dashboard nobody opens and a messy .xlsx where the real work happens.
So I've mostly stopped trying to replace it. We just launched Basedash for Excel (check it out!), which reads an .xlsx and builds dashboards from it, then lets you export back out to a spreadsheet. Working with the format instead of against it felt like the only honest bet.
But I could be wrong. Maybe agents really do make the manual grid feel as dated as a fax machine in a few years.