

Plenty of people populate Excel's seemingly infinite grids with data, using it as a flat-file database.

The current Excel version, available in Microsoft Office 2021 as part of a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription and other methods, is a PCMag Editors' Choice. Excel is powerful and does just about everything one could ask for in a spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel's dominance as a spreadsheet has yet to be truly tested, certainly not by Corel's Quattro Pro (still sold today in WordPerfect Office), the open-source tools of LibreOffice, or even by Google Sheets.

It's the world's premier spreadsheet application, and has been the industry standard for over 35 years, replacing the once-venerable Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for PCs in the 1980s. There are very few people on Earth who could ever say they've completely mastered every little thing about Microsoft Excel.
