Research Into Excel Use

By Author: Ed Bolton
Total Articles: 17
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Microsoft Excel has 400 million worldwide users and is so essential to business that people have stopped asking simple questions like "how much does it get used?" In fact, if you do a web search for Excel research, you are unlikely to find sites relating to the software itself.



This is particularly strange because there are so many people out there offering Excel training. It seems these people do not even feel they need to prove the benefits of such courses. It is just taken as blindingly obvious that employees could be using Excel more efficiently.



The best statistics out there come from a 2009 Dartmouth College study with the somewhat verbiose title "Comparison of Characteristics and Practices amongst Spreadsheet Users with Different Levels of Experience". They surveyed 1600 individuals but half of them were self-selecting experts. However, they have produced separate results for basic users.



From the subset of basic users, we can deduce that 5% of all employee time is spent on Excel. That's 2 hours a week. Every week. Even more interesting is the ...
... fact that 80% of employees use more than 1 spreadsheet a week. There are few people out there who never use Excel. The only significant sample bias is that 70% of interviewees were male. The average age was over 40 and no more than 20% worked in any single sector of the economy.



What is so fascinating about Microsoft Excel, is that nearly everyone (98% of respondents) will create spreadsheets from scratch and that they will use these spreadsheets week after week. Most spreadsheets are used for over a year.



The reason this research is of interest is that it suggests that people dedicate a significant proportion of their time to updating their own spreadsheets. If you've never updated a spreadsheet, you may not appreciate how tedious an activity this can be. In the vast majority of cases, users will simply transferring data from one place on their computer to another.



In an ideal world, this would all be automated and optimized. In the real world, it won't be. That's because most users won't know how much time they are wasting e.g. if you can cut a 20 minute weekly task down to 10, that's going to save a day a year. Sometimes you can realize those savings simply by adding a new formula to a sheet.



However, it is certainly the case that when a user's taking 2 days every month preparing monthly reports, they tend to question whether they could be doing it a better way. Mainly because the robotic nature of updating a spreadsheet is extremely boring. It's bad for employee motivation, it also wastes business time.



The solution is to provide users with on-demand Excel support. This can either come from within or outside the organization, although the latter should be assumed more efficient.



The fact there are solutions though, does not address the fundamental question of how much Excel gets used, and how much more efficiently it could get used. The answer to that will only come when more researchers pick up where the Dartmouth study left off. The simple truth is that, with 400 million users, we are probably wasting thousands of lifetimes every single day and don't even realize it.



About the Author: Ed Bolton is the founder of Excel4Business, providers of Excel Support.