It’s not December without Excel sheet anxiety. Are you the only one?

It’s the end of the year, and the moment of truth has arrived. All our achievements, failures, and goals come down to a few Excel sheets, which, in the corporate world, sum us up as professionals.

For many, filling them in is not exactly the most wonderful time of the year. So, how can you end 2025 without a single sheet getting the best of you?

Cybernews asked managers to identify the source of their stress related to Excel sheets. It’s not as technical as one might think. While some Excel software updates or novelties do play an important role, injustice and a fake representation of reality are among the most mentioned Excel-sheet-stress factors.

Excel sheets give no context

Take Sara Cemin and her team, for example. She’s the head of customer relations at Helio Cure and claims that Excel sheet-related stress stems from the reductionism it enforces. A good example is an incident that recently occurred in her team.

It turns out she “took six hours to calm a very angry client down” and “saved us a large contract by using her patience and emotional intelligence to understand their needs.”

“This incredible achievement was documented on our year-end spreadsheet simply by adding a "1" to the "Tickets Closed" column. The achievements' significance has been diminished by reducing them to numbers.”

According to Cemin, situations like these being summed up in an Excel sheet create “a sense of cognitive dissonance” as most people understand their work value is based on quality, but reports require quantity measures.

“The dissonance creates anxiety because we know the report is a representation of reality that is inaccurate. We are concerned that our leaders will only look at the report and not the actuality of what we do.”

“Reducing all of this to simply a fear of numbers is oversimplifying the problem. What we are afraid of is being misunderstood. The spreadsheet is a language that doesn't provide the words to describe what we really do,” Cemin explains.

The stakes of using an incorrect formula are too high, and Microsoft knows it

When running a business, a well-done Excel sheet that represents profit, loss, expenses etc. is the main source of determining not only annual results, but also planning the year ahead – we’re talking bonuses, new hires, salaries, you name it.

“I've personally had an experience of extreme stress related to using spreadsheets, being the director of operations for a busy plumbing firm where accurate data determines our daily success,” Emily Demirdonder from Waverley, Australia, begins her story.

According to her, spreadsheets are the source of most of her stress regarding accuracy.

“As we provide fixed-price quotes for the services we perform, an error in our budget spreadsheets can greatly affect the company's net income,” she said.

At the beginning of December, Microsoft introduced a new Copilot feature in Excel that allows users to create formulas by describing what they want to happen on the sheet in natural language instead of a conventional math formula.

For example: “Calculate total profit" is a phrase a user could type into a box, and Copilot will generate a formula automatically.

“Review the formula suggestion, the description, and the preview of the result on the grid. Then, select either Keep it if the suggestion works for you, or Discard, and then type = and run the Ask Copilot for a formula option again,” explains the company.

Microsoft says the update is designed to make Excel easier and faster to use, particularly for individuals new to formulas or those who struggle to recall specific functions.

Human error is one thing, but Excel cyber vulnerabilities are a whole different aspect

It gets even worse for those working in insurance. As Michael Benoit, founder of California Contractor Bond & Insurance Services, puts it, a single-entry error in a spreadsheet can result in a client losing their license or lead to a costly tax audit.

“I also believe that anxiety is caused because a spreadsheet lacks the safety features that most modern software provides as protection for users. My employees are nervous about performing manual reconciliations because they worry about making a typing mistake due to the fact that there is no program that will alert them if they make an error. This fear of invisible error is paralyzing when you know that one mistake is able to destroy months of hard-earned profit,” he says.

In December, Microsoft disclosed and patched several security vulnerabilities that posed risks to Excel and other Office applications, which could be exploited through malicious files. Some of them allowed remote code execution – a way for attackers to run harmful programs by simply persuading a user to open a spreadsheet.

Microsoft stated that some of the vulnerabilities had already been detected in real-world attacks, including privilege-escalation flaws in Windows components associated with Office usage.

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