“I’m a boring man,” says Mike Elwin, an energy management consultant from Warrington. “My friends think it’s ridiculous how much I use Microsoft Excel. But it’s a dead handy tool.”
Elwin, 56, has long used Excel to organise his life – from mapping finances, to plotting medical test results, to monitoring his household energy use. When his son was born in 2007, he made a spreadsheet for the feeding schedule.
“We logged the feeding times and the quantity of milk, and then we would try to work out when we could get some sleep.” None of this data turned out to be much use, Elwin adds, “but it made us feel better at the time.”
Still, he is evangelistic about Excel. “I have graphs going back 10 years,” he says. “Some friends take the mickey – but now they’ve started using it to plan their holidays.”
Elwin is one of dozens of people who responded to an online callout about their love for Excel as it reached its 40th year.
Many found applications for the software that the developers probably did not intend.
“I grew up with it,” says John Severn, 35, a marketing director from Mansfield. “When I was 11, I couldn’t afford Warhammer models, so I used to write their names in Excel, print them off and do our battles of elves and dwarves on the cheap.”
John Severn playing boardgames (not generated on Excel). Photograph: Guardian Community
Severn’s innovation bemused some of his opponents. The tabletop game of Warhammer is meant to be played with intricately painted models, rather than labelled grids.
“The child of my mum’s rich friend wasn’t very chuffed,” he says. “They’d spent a lot of money and got some beautifully painted models and had put them all out on the table with some scenery. And what I brought along were essentially some paper squares.”
Severn still plays Warhammer, though he has graduated to model soldiers. “I still don’t enjoy painting them.”
For Lucy, 41, Excel proved useful in her long-distance relationship when her partner relocated from London to Macclesfield in 2010.
“I love Excel, she says. “I devised a spreadsheet to keep track of the trains and costs. I stayed in London, and we took it in turns travelling every weekend for 18 months. We split the costs with the higher earner paying proportionally more.”
Lucy acknowledges how unromantic this all sounds. But “it was so useful and set the tone for sharing more finances … Now we have kids and have bought a house, Excel has supported with the admin around this.”
Excel played a hand in how Luke, a civil servant from London, named his two sons. “My wife and I were discussing baby names, and at some point I stuck a list of them on a spreadsheet called Names for Baby V.1.xlsx.”
He shared the spreadsheet with his office in the hope his colleagues might provide inspiration. “I remember there was a good push for Frederick and Maximilian. They also added Optimus Prime and Herodotus,” he says. “My Russian wife liked Igor and Ivan.”
Luke and his wife did not take any of his colleagues’ ideas in the end. But he made another spreadsheet for his second son. “His name came from a suggestion of a colleague I met at work drinks. But it also tested very well in Names for Baby V.2.xlsx,” he adds.
Nick Owen from Lincoln took his enthusiasm a step further, making Excel a central feature of his wedding in 2019.
“We wanted as many friends there as we could and we managed to get 250 people to turn up,” says Owen, 68. With so many guests, he decided to nominate seven best men to help organise the day.
Nick Owen’s wedding T-shirt, with his spreadsheet printed on the back. Photograph: Guardian Community
“I called them the Magnificent Seven, and they had a different role each.” These jobs included rings, food, speeches, and drinks. “I diligently worked out a spreadsheet with what everybody was doing on the day, on an hour to hour basis, with little crosses in the cells. I went through all of this with them on the night before. There was a bit of reluctance,” he says.
“It was in Cumbria in April, and the weather had been bad for weeks leading up to the wedding day. But miraculously, the clouds parted, the sun shined – and my wedding spreadsheet worked.”
To remember the day, Owen had T-shirts printed for his best men. “They had a picture of Yul Brynner [from the Magnificent Seven film] on the front, and a picture of my spreadsheet on the back.”
