“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 is a very useful tool.”
Elwin, 56, has long used Excel to organize his life, from mapping his finances to plotting medical test results and monitoring his home’s energy use. When her son was born in 2007, she made a feeding schedule spreadsheet.
“We recorded feeding times and the amount of milk, and then tried to calculate when we could get some sleep.” None of this data turned out to be very useful, Elwin adds, “but it made us feel better at the time.”
Still, he is an evangelist about Excel. “I have charts that go back 10 years,” he says. “Some friends use Mickey, but now they’ve started using it to plan their vacations.”
Elwin is one of dozens of people who responded to an online call about their love. for Excel when you turn 40 years old.
Many found applications for the software that the developers probably did not intend.
“I grew up with it,” says John Severn, 35, Mansfield’s marketing director. “When I was 11, I couldn’t afford Warhammer models, so I used to type their names into Excel, print them out and do our elf and dwarf battles for cheap.”
Severn’s innovation baffled some of his opponents. The Warhammer board game is intended to be played with intricately painted models, rather than labeled grids.
“My mother’s rich friend’s son was not very happy,” she says. “They spent a lot of money, got some beautifully painted models and put them all on the table with some decorations. And what I brought was essentially some squares of paper.”
Severn still plays Warhammer, although he graduated as a soldier model. “I still don’t enjoy painting them.”
For Lucy, 41, Excel came in handy in her long-distance relationship when her partner moved from London to Macclesfield in 2010.
“I love Excel,” he says. “I devised a spreadsheet to track trains and costs. I stayed in London and we took turns traveling every weekend for 18 months. We divide the costs and whoever earns more pays proportionally more.”
Lucy recognizes how “unromantic” this all sounds. But “it was very helpful and set the tone for sharing more finances… Now we have children and we have bought a house, Excel has helped us with the administrator in all of this.”
Excel helped Luke, a London civil servant, name his two sons. “My wife and I were talking about baby names and at some point I pasted a list of them into a spreadsheet called Names for Baby V.1.xlsx.”
He shared the spreadsheet with his office in the hope that his colleagues could provide inspiration. “I remember that there was a good push for Federico and Maximiliano. They also added Optimus Prime and Herodotus,” he says. “My Russian wife liked Igor and Ivan.”
In the end, Luke and his wife did not accept any of their colleagues’ ideas. But she made another spreadsheet for her second child. “His name came about at the suggestion of a colleague I met over drinks at work. But it also worked very well in Names for Baby V.2.xlsx,” he adds.
Lincoln’s Nick Owen took his enthusiasm a step further and made Excel a central feature of his 2019 wedding.
“We wanted as many friends as possible to attend and we managed to get 250 people to attend,” says Owen, 68. With so many guests, he decided to nominate seven godparents to help organize the day.
“I called them the Magnificent Seven and each one had a different role.” These jobs included rings, food, speeches and drinks. “I diligently made a spreadsheet of what everyone was doing that day, hour by hour, with little crosses in the cells. I went through all of this with them the night before. “There was a bit of reluctance,” he says.
“It was in Cumbria in April, and the weather had been bad in the weeks leading up to the wedding day. But miraculously, the clouds parted, the sun shone, and my wedding spreadsheet worked.”
To remember the day, Owen had t-shirts printed for his best men. “They had a photo of Yul Brynner (from the movie The Magnificent Seven) on the front and a photo of my spreadsheet on the back.”