Excel quietly became a multiplayer game: 1,200 people in a single file at once
Excel product lead Brian Jones says they have seen over 1,200 users in one workbook at the same time, 500 of them actively editing; multiplayer usage has more than tripled in four years.
While the AI era keeps declaring the spreadsheet dead, a striking admission arrived from the world's most veteran office tool. Brian Jones, Excel's product lead, wrote that the team has seen instances of more than 1,200 people inside a single workbook at once, with 500 of them actively editing cells. The trend matters even more: Excel's multiplayer usage has more than tripled over the past four years.
According to Jones, tracking scenarios make up some of the largest categories of workbooks Excel sees: live sheets where teams follow work, inventory and process together. The spreadsheet, in other words, is no longer a file one person prepares and emails around; it is shared ground that hundreds of people inhabit at the same time. This is the quiet victory of the online document: nobody held a ceremony, but the heart of office software went multiplayer.
In the same days, an interesting experiment is accelerating at the other end of the Microsoft camp: in work shown by principal engineer Vesa Juvonen, every Copilot question renders exactly the UX you need, live and inline, no links and no popups, with MCP apps and automatic hosting underneath. On one end, live sheets shared by hundreds of humans; on the other, screens that draw themselves per question: two separate futures of office software are being rehearsed inside one company.
One note for the record: figuring out who broke row 42 in a 1,200-person workbook is still not on the list of problems humanity has solved.
