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Excel Is Still the Second Most-Named Tool in Operations Hiring (2026 Data)

By Jaron Sander ·

Excel appears in 14,252 of 96,328 analyzed ops and GTM job postings — second only to Salesforce and twice HubSpot. In Sales Operations, 37% of postings still name a spreadsheet.

Inform Growth research card: Excel is the second most-named tool in operations hiring. 14,252 postings. Still.
On this page
  1. Where the spreadsheet shows up
  2. The spreadsheet is the reconciliation layer
  3. Most postings name no tools at all
  4. A note on what this counts
  5. How this was measured

Excel appears in 14,252 of 96,328 analyzed operations and go-to-market job postings collected between January and July 2026 — 15% of all postings, second only to Salesforce (21,997) and more than twice HubSpot (7,019). Twenty years into the SaaS era, the spreadsheet is still the most-named non-CRM tool in operations hiring.

Where the spreadsheet shows up

Role class Postings naming Excel Share of class
Sales Operations 1,114 37%
Revenue Operations 412 27%
CS Operations 133 27%
Chief of Staff / BizOps 571 24%
Portfolio / M&A Operations 58 22%
Service Operations 48 15%
All GTM-adjacent roles 11,525 14%
Sales Engineering 127 11%
SDR / BDR 238 5%
AI leadership 26 2%

Bar chart of the share of job postings naming Excel by role class, led by Sales Operations at 37%, Revenue Operations at 27%, and CS Operations at 27%.

The gradient is the finding. Excel concentrates in exactly the roles that sit between systems — Sales Ops, RevOps, CS Ops, BizOps — and nearly vanishes in the roles that sit inside one system (SDR/BDR, 5%) or above all of them (AI leadership, 2%).

The spreadsheet is the reconciliation layer

A job posting that names both a CRM and a spreadsheet is describing a workflow where the CRM is not sufficient on its own. In Sales Operations, 61% of postings name Salesforce and 37% name Excel. Those are not separate populations — they are largely the same postings, describing a job where the numbers come out of the system of record and get finished somewhere else.

This is why spreadsheet mentions track integration pain rather than seniority. The roles with the most Excel also carry the most integration-pain language: Sales Operations at 46%, Revenue Operations at 68%.

Most postings name no tools at all

Excel's rank is striking partly because the baseline is so low. Of the 96,328 analyzed postings:

  • 50,332 (52%) name no software tool at all
  • 22,567 (23%) name exactly one
  • 2,601 (2.7%) name six or more

Histogram of postings by number of distinct tools named in the job description, showing a long tail out to ten or more tools.

So the tool-sprawl story is really about a minority of postings: a long tail of roles where someone is expected to own six, eight, or ten named systems at once. Those postings are also the ones most likely to ask for AI — the AI mention rate rises from 16% at zero tools to 58% at five or more.

A note on what this counts

Tool extraction counts named products, matched case-sensitively for ambiguous names like "Excel" to avoid false positives on ordinary English. A posting that says "strong spreadsheet skills" without naming Excel or Google Sheets counts as zero. These figures are floors, not ceilings.

How this was measured

These figures come from Inform Growth's 2026 study of 294,483 job postings, collected from public job boards between January 4 and July 26, 2026, with a collection pause in April and May. SQL and Python are tracked as skills and excluded from tool counts. Text analysis covers the 96,328 postings in target and GTM-adjacent roles with English descriptions of at least 300 characters.

Read the full research: What 294,483 Job Postings Reveal About AI and Operations Hiring in 2026

Related: The RevOps tech stack · Salesforce vs HubSpot in job postings · Does mentioning AI raise advertised salary?

Inform Growth builds and runs managed AI infrastructure for teams whose reporting still ends in a spreadsheet. Start here.

Frequently asked questions

Is Excel still used in operations roles in 2026?

Yes. Excel is named in 14,252 of 96,328 analyzed operations and go-to-market job postings — 15% of all postings, second only to Salesforce and more than twice HubSpot.

Which roles require Excel most?

Sales Operations, where 37% of postings name Excel, followed by Revenue Operations and CS Operations at 27% each. Excel nearly vanishes in roles that sit inside one system, appearing in only 5% of SDR/BDR postings.

How many job postings name no software tools at all?

50,332 of 96,328 analyzed postings — 52% — name no software tool at all, while 2,601 postings name six or more.