Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is Microsoft's spreadsheet application and the long-standing standard for financial modelling, reporting, and everyday data work. It ships as a desktop app for Windows and Mac, as mobile apps, and as Excel for the web, and is part of the Microsoft 365 suite.

Its formula engine has more than 500 functions, including dynamic arrays (XLOOKUP, FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE) and LAMBDA for defining reusable custom functions. PivotTables and PivotCharts summarise large tables interactively, conditional formatting and sparklines highlight patterns, and Python in Excel runs Python code in the cloud directly from cells.

For data preparation, Power Query connects to databases, files, web sources, and cloud services, and records cleaning steps so a report can be refreshed with one click. Power Pivot builds a data model with relationships and DAX measures, the same modelling language Power BI uses. Automation comes from VBA macros on the desktop and Office Scripts on the web, and Copilot writes formulas, builds charts, and explains data from plain-language prompts.

Files saved to OneDrive or SharePoint support real-time co-authoring and version history, though collaboration is less fluid than in cloud-native tools such as Google Sheets. Excel for the web is free with a Microsoft account but lacks the desktop's advanced features. The full desktop app comes with a Microsoft 365 subscription: consumer plans (Personal, Family, and Premium, which adds higher Copilot usage) or business plans priced per user per month. Very large datasets are better handled in a database or BI tool, since a worksheet holds about a million rows.