“I’m a boring man,” says Mike Elwin, an energy management consultant from Warrington. “My friends think it’s ridiculous how much I use Micro

‘I grew up with it’: readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

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2024-10-28 13:00:07

“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.”

“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.”