Microsoft Excel's estimated market share
Excel "with an estimated 90% market share is found on nearly every business computer" [source]
The market has changed since I wrote the above 20+ years ago. Lotus 1-2-3's final release was in 2002, Quattro Pro was last updated in 2000 (as part of the the Wordperfect suite), and no one remembers Software602. LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice) offers a free desktop suite aimed at home users, while Google's cloud based Workspace (formerly G Suite) has become the dominant player with a powerful programming language and free for personal use license
I asked ChatGPT and Claude.ai for Excel's current 2024 market share and both replied with the 90% figure. ChatGPT gave a 80-90% range. Perhaps they scraped the web, found my old 90%, and ran with it as authoritative.
Excel is bundled with Microsoft Office 365 while Google Sheets (spreadsheet) is bundled with Google Workspace. Sheets, which is free for personal use, hasa a larger share of home, small business,, and younger users, while Excel dominates in larger and older enterprises invested in the MIcrosoft Univrse (Teams, Outlook, exchange servers...)
| G Suite | 59.41% |
| Office 365 | 40.39% |
A further breakdown shows Google Sheets used more by smaller businesses than large.
| 31% of businesses use Google Sheets for enterprise business processes. |
| Google Sheets is used by over 35% of companies with 10-50 employees |
| About 59.98% of Google Sheets customers are in the small (10-50 employees) bracket. |
| About 76.67% of Google Sheets customers are from the United States. |
| Source: Gitnux.org |
Grid.is has an excellent article, worth a read, which I link to below and will not attempt to paraphrase,The article puts Excel at approximately 82% of active spreadsheet users (as opposed to suite users & downloads) in 2018 and Sheets at approximately 18%.
Demographic quotes:
| "Young people use Google Sheets" |
| "Young companies are also more likely to use Google Sheets than Microsoft Excel" |
| "when a young person joins an established organization they get the Microsoft Office suite thrown at them immediately, and get dragged into the Excel world quickly. This probably means that Excel's market share is falling significantly slower than might be indicated by Sheets' dominance in the education system." |
| Source: Grid.is - Excel vs. Google Sheets usage - nature and numbers |
From ComputerWorld:
| "Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020." |
| "Our market share analysis shows that Google is continually growing and taking market share, but at a rate that's still quite minimal: it's not making a huge dent into what is a Microsoft-dominated space." |
| "A recent CCS Insight report on app collaboration usage showed that Teams, the workstream collaboration tool within Office 365, is the most widely used (42% of respondents), compared to Google Workspace as a whole (21%). |
| Source: ComputerWorld: As Google moves to reshape Workspace, barriers to business adoption remain |
From OKTA.com - Business At Work 2024 global survey:
| "This year, the growth of Google's productivity suite outstrips that of its chief rival, Microsoft 365 (still the leader in overall customer popularity), narrowing the gap between these heavyweights." |
| "Among Okta's Microsoft 365 customers - 45% also deploy Google Workspace, up from 42% last year." |
| Source: okta.com - Businesses at Work 2024 |
Bottom line: Market share varies by definition of the market. Google Sheets has larger share of the more price conscious home and small business markets while Excel is prefered in larger businesses and enterprise. Google continues to make inroads in all markets, wth slower share growth in Microsoft dominated corporate world.