Recently, I saw a reader comment that they’re not going to bother learning a new Excel function because Copilot can do the work for them. This made me wonder, “Do we still need Excel skills in today’s AI world?” After some thought, the answer was a resounding “YES!” Here’s why.
Many Jobs Still Require Excel Skills
Whether you want to secure a role as an administrative assistant, HR administrator, market researcher, accountant, financial analyst, or statistician, it’s likely that the job still requires at least a basic understanding of Excel.
According to Indeed, “Project managers, analysts, researchers, and other specialists use [Excel] to record, analyze, and visualize data using elements such as graphs and charts.” In fact, a quick search on Indeed for jobs with “advanced Excel skills” returned over 52,000 positions in the US and 4,000 in the UK.
I often see people on forums worrying that they’re going to be replaced by AI in the near future. However, at the moment, people in Excel-based jobs are more likely to find themselves unemployed if they become lazy and stagnate as a result of over-reliance on AI. Instead, people should look for ways to leverage AI alongside Excel to bring more value to their work, thus staying ahead of the curve and making sure their bosses see them as indispensable in today’s AI world.
Excel Skills Are Transferable
Learning Excel skills gives you transferable, real-world expertise. Whether you’ve achieved formal Excel certification or used HTG guides and online videos to work your way around the program in your spare time, you’re likely to have either picked up or refined many fundamental and advanced skills:
- Mathematical skills
- Problem-solving
- Data organization
- Data interpretation
- Data visualization
- Time management
- Efficiency
- Critical thinking
- Coding, VBA, and Python skills
- and many more!
What’s more, Excel isn’t just for accountants. For example, I use it at home for budgeting, planning my next vacation, and monitoring my sports team’s stats, and I can present and format my data in a way that works in a given context and suits my needs—nuances that Copilot would struggle to grasp.
Don’t Underestimate That Rewarding Feeling
Maybe it’s just me, but I love the sense of achievement I get from learning a new Excel function, figuring out how it works, and implementing it in my spreadsheet. I take great pleasure in finding ways to simplify complex formulas, making minor tweaks to apply them in different scenarios, and troubleshooting my workbook when things don’t go quite as I expect. And don’t even get me started on the excitement of being handed an old template and having to rework it so that it’s streamlined and less confusing.
Much like a piece of artwork, Excel gives you the opportunity to start with a blank canvas and create something tangible that you and your acquaintances can appreciate. I see Excel almost as a 2D version of Lego for adults that scratches an unexplainable itch (if you know, you know). I will use any excuse to start up a new spreadsheet, and I don’t plan to forgo this therapeutic brain training in favor of AI anytime soon.
You Need (Some) Excel Knowledge to Use Copilot Optimally
Microsoft repeatedly says in its literature that you can use “natural language” to drive Copilot in Excel. However, as someone who has answered thousands of Excel questions on online forums for many years, I’ve lost count of the number of times the person asking the question can’t fully articulate exactly what they want to do.
Moreover, Microsoft’s FAQs for Copilot in Excel encourages you to “be specific with your questions.” The tech firm even has a tutorial for “cooking up a great prompt,” further evidence that using AI to create your spreadsheets requires more than basic, everyday conversational language.
That’s why Excel skills are still required—we need to digest a vague idea, process what it means, consider the best way to convert it into something Excel can do, and then execute it. After all, if someone can’t clearly explain to a human what they want to do, how are they supposed to work alongside Microsoft’s AI assistant to create complex databases?
In other words, Copilot might be a useful tool for people who already have a decent level of Excel expertise. For the average Joe who has never seen a spreadsheet, however, it may end up being one step too far.
Microsoft seems to be looking for ways to reduce the Excel expertise required to use Copilot. For example, in June 2024, it announced that users are “no longer limited to using Copilot in Excel only in Excel tables,” meaning people don’t need to know how to create formatted Excel tables in order to use it effectively. However, given Copilot’s infancy, you still require a foundational level of Excel knowledge to use the program’s AI tool comprehensively.
AI Isn’t Perfect
By Microsoft’s own admission, “Copilot is built upon Large Language Models (LLMs), which are trained to predict the next words and phrases. LLMs can occasionally generate content that is biased, offensive, harmful, or incorrect. Therefore, it is imperative to consistently review and validate the responses for accuracy and appropriateness.”
While Copilot is undoubtedly improving with time, many people still report it coughing up results that don’t quite cut the mustard, requiring the user to rework the command or edit the data manually. To this end, you also need Excel skills to know if (and how) things have gone wrong. If you build the data manually, you’ll be better equipped to strip it back, troubleshoot it, and debug it.
As a result, as I discussed earlier, having more Excel skills at your disposal will give you better insight into using Copilot to its full extent.
Even though commercial planes have autopilot, they still require highly skilled pilots. Even though calculators exist, people still need arithmetic skills.
Today, Excel remains a necessary tool that, in my opinion, will most likely be used for decades to come. And while Copilot might help us work smarter, I can’t see it replacing the need for Excel experts anytime soon.
