Welcome to the 1,370 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! 🤯 If you aren’t subscribed, join 37,892 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
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This week’s Not Boring is brought to you by … Michael Bolton
(Okay, not actually Michael Bolton. But he does star in this sponsor’s latest ad campaign, so ... close enough.)
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Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Monday!
One of the places I learn the most is a group chat I have with my friends Dror Poleg and Ben Rollert. Dror, who writes about the history and future of work, cities, and finance, and Ben, who is the founder and CEO of Composer, are two of the smartest people I know.
Ben, the most technical of the trio (followed by Dror, then me), also happens to be an excellent writer. In late February, he released The Composer Manifesto, to make the case for investing as a creative endeavor. It’s tailor made for the two types of people who read Not Boring -- investors and tech people -- and you should read it:
So when Ben texted us about how underrated Excel’s power is, I asked him to write about it with me. He opened my eyes to so much depth I didn’t know existed in the product in which I spent every waking hour for the formative years of my career. We’ll try to do the same for you.
Let’s get to it.
Excel Never Dies
In the popular marketing book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland writes, “A spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles.” We could not disagree more strongly.
Most software we use at work exists in one of two categories:
It’s new and we love it for now.
It’s old but we have to use it and we hate it.
But there’s one software product born in 1985, before many of us were even a twinkle in our parents’ eye, that inhabits its own category: it’s old, but we love it, we always will, and you’ll have to pry it from our cold, dead, fingers. That product, of course, is Microsoft Excel.