Microsoft Excel
productMicrosoft's spreadsheet editor, increasingly integrated with AI. In ToTheMoon: 30 episodes from 2024 to 2026; most often alongside AI models and assistants and Markets, investment, and business models.
* Counted from the transcripts: a role and a mention count are recorded for every episode.
Microsoft Excel in ToTheMoon episodes
On ToTheMoon, Microsoft Excel is the measure of mass-market software. The hosts bring it up to explain what real adoption looks like, and when they debate where AI should live: in the spreadsheet or in its place. Two questions keep coming back: whether putting models inside Excel delivers real value, and whether the spreadsheet itself stays necessary once formulas and reports can be generated from a description.
The integration debate runs through 2026. In episode 103 Claude's integration with Microsoft was read as Anthropic's route into the enterprise, an intelligence layer inside Word and Excel rather than a rival; Alexander called Excel the number one product in the world and, in the same breath, asked his partners why they needed it at all. Episode 109 treated ChatGPT's arrival in Excel as no longer news and asked whether to work from Excel with ChatGPT or the reverse, concluding that a model can assemble formulas but the value lies in a verifiable result on real data.
Excel also remains the yardstick for habits. In episode 109 Alexander said he had “almost stopped working in Excel in the last six months” (episode 109), and in episode 127 that he avoids it, though Word and Excel remain the most used software and xAI now wants in too. Episode 130 observed that people learned Excel through daily use rather than courses, and episode 148 finished the thought: until Codex or Claude Code become as ordinary as Word and Excel, nothing will happen. Yet episode 146 acknowledged that many businesses still keep their books in Excel, with models used to pull information out of them.