Every few months, a new SaaS darling appears, plethoric with ambition, promising to “reimagine spreadsheets” or “redefine planning”. The demos are slick, the animations bounce just right, and there’s usually a whimsical mascot involved in their logo1. They claim they’re not Excel, and that’s supposed to be a feature. But Excel remains. Quiet, vintage, undefeated.
It’s not that Excel is something to worship. Most of us use a fraction of its actual capabilities. But it’s familiar, it’s local, and most importantly, it’s still here. New SaaS platforms promise collaboration, sYnErGy, and “single sources of truth”. Excel promises that when you open a file five years from now, it will still open. Excel doesn’t pretend to have opinions. It gives you a grid and says: good luck.
Excel is the cockroach of software: unkillable, unimpressive, but reliable. These new tools, with their pastel UI and overenthusiastic salespeople who will not stop pestering you if you make the mistake of showing an iota of interest in their product, expect us to move our entire planning infrastructure into their hands. Timelines, deliverables, financial models—your entire company “brain”—hosted by a venture-backed startup, one billing cycle away from extinction.
According to a 2023 study by Productiv, over half of all SaaS tools procured by enterprises go unused after a year2. Meanwhile, Gartner’s 2022 tech lifecycle analysis showed that nearly a third of SaaS platforms intended for project planning never make it past pilot phase3. Translation: the graveyard is full of Gantt chart apps that once promised to “streamline workflows”.
And speaking of Gantt charts; what is it with the SaaS obsession with reinventing planning? Every platform now offers some combination of calendars, dependencies, milestones, Kanban boards, and something they call a “timeline view” (it’s just a Gantt chart with rounded corners). It all feels like Google Calendar with extra steps and worse keyboard shortcuts.
Most of these tools treat planning like it’s a visual problem; if we can just color-code it better, surely we’ll hit our deadlines. But planning isn’t about beautiful charts. It’s about decisions, tradeoffs, and the kind of chaos that doesn’t fit neatly into swimlanes.
And then there’s the data migration. SaaS platforms love to capture it, analyze it, and lock it in proprietary formats. Excel, bless its simplistic soul, lets you hoard your mess locally. You can zip it, email it, or hide it in obscure folders of your choice. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t require an API key. It just opens.
We all groan when we see Excel used as a project tracker, CRM, or vacation request form. But there’s a reason it keeps getting shoehorned into everything. It works. It works today, and it will work in several years. Not in the delightful, joyful, SaaS-conference-keynote way, but in the “I can open this and get the job done right now” way.
So yes, Excel might be ugly. Yes, it’s pushed outside of its envelope too often. But it has one killer feature none of the newcomers can offer: permanence. Excel is the thing you turn to after the SaaS darling has gone through three pivots, changed its pricing model twice, and quietly sunset your precious data with a Medium post titled “The Next Chapter”.
In a world of software that disappears faster than quarterly goals, we’ll stick with the crusty old spreadsheet that doesn’t promise anything magical, just that it’ll still be here tomorrow.
A classic: when you go to the “customers” area, you will most likely see Airbus there. Either Airbus is the champion adopter of shitty software, or their PR department is not giving a sh*t about who uses their logo and for what.