TikToks on how to use Excel spreadsheets are getting billions of views and building one of the best communities on the platform

• TikTok's Excel community is vast, with some stars garnering millions of followers making tutorials.
• Some of the biggest Excel influencers are "Miss Excel," "Your Excel Friend," and "Excel Daddy."

TikTok has spawned countless trends and subcultures on a wide variety of topics. Videos featuring the Microsoft spreadsheet program Excel are among those to recently become hugely popular on the platform.

Although data programming and digit calculation may not seem like it would make for the flashiest clips, Excel TikTok tutorials and comedy sketches have amassed millions of views and morphed into an entire genre of content, with an array of influencers that spans languages and continents.

The TikTok hashtag "excel" has over 1.8 billion views in total, and some of the biggest TikTokers in the space have hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to their videos featuring jokes about Excel and how-to guides.

Excel influencers fuse spreadsheet tutorials with comedy

Your Excel Friend, who goes by the handle @excel.friend, is one of the most popular Excel-centric channels on the platform with over 2.7 million followers and 9.7 million likes. The influencer has never revealed their face or voice, and all their videos are tutorials with funny on-screen captions, while pop music or TikTok hits are broadcasted in the background.

Another popular creator in the space is known as "Excel Daddy" and has over 440,000 followers, 13 million views, and 1.4 million likes on the app.

Excel Daddy, who hasn't publicly disclosed their name, has been posting spreadsheet-centric memes and tutorials since June. Most videos feature voice-over narration and TikTok's face-builder effect, which superimposes eyes and a mouth onto objects, giving them a comedic effect.

"I decided to not just add some flavor to Excel but really bring some spice. I developed a character that I use in most
of my videos," Excel Daddy told Insider in an email. "That's how I went from showing a few functions to becoming the Excel Daddy of TikTok. I flirt with my audience quite a bit too, by blowing kisses or winking at them."

@excel4thewin

##stitch with @theblacksheep99 ##excel ##excel4thewin ##excel4dummies ##learnontiktok ##worksmarternotharder ##officelife

♬ original sound - Excel Daddy

Kat Norton, who began making TikTok videos in June 2020 under the name "Miss Excel," has also skyrocketed to over 650,000 followers, making her one of the app's most popular Excel influencers.

She has leveraged her TikTok fame into a software tutorial business called Miss Excel, from which she reportedly makes over $100,000 a day, according to a recent interview with The Verge.

Unlike Excel Daddy, Norton features heavily in her clips. But she also takes a comedic approach, integrating popular dances and viral lip-syncing into spreadsheet content, like twisting her body to Disclosure's bouncy dance-pop hit "Latch" while showing viewers a tip to latch multiple cells together.

@miss.excel Excel hack sponsored by Fredi! Use the code MISS.EXCEL15 for 15% off my favorite wellness product to boost memory, focus & mood! (link in bio) #excel ♬ Latch - Disclosure

A common Excel TikTok trend involves creators referring to their 'boss'

Many Excel TikToks follow a common format, beginning with a caption along the lines of "My boss asked me to do this," and then showing viewers how to execute a certain task on the program.

Excel Daddy told Insider he does this to make his videos relatable. "I think most people have had an incompetent boss, colleague, or client so maybe that specific person will show up in the viewer's head," he said.

Some creators like "Your Excel Friend" take this trope to the extreme and post long-winded stories about what their "boss" asked them to do.

In a video posted September 17 with 1.8 million views, the creator wrote in on-screen text that their "boss" forced them to "cancel your weekend" to sort out an Excel crisis in which the spreadsheet's height and width were wrong.

@excel.friend save this coz ur gonna need it when ur a grown up #spreadsheet #tutorial ♬ The Ecstasy of Gold (From "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly") - Ennio Morricone

"That's my weekend Fvk€d," the TikToker wrote in another on-screen caption with sad emojis, before they added "UNLESS…" and then proceeded to provide a tutorial on how to solve the issue. Ennio Morricone's heroic "The Ecstasy of Gold" soundtrack played in the background.

The Excel online community is largely welcoming and diverse

Compared to some of the darker sides of TikTok, this community appears to be drama-free and positive. The comment sections of Excel TikToks are often flooded with folks asking additional questions and other users responding with assistance.

Excel Daddy told Insider that he sees very few negative comments on his videos and that everyone involved in the community is "extremely engaged" because they want to learn.

The Excel TikTok genre also includes a plethora of non-English speakers. There's @excel_rus, a Russian-speaking creator with over 460,000 followers; Francisco Terán, an Ecuadorian influencer who describes himself in his bio as TikTok's official Excel professor and has 1.7 million followers; @mindpower43, a French-speaking Excel expert with almost 6,000 followers; the Turkish-speaking Excel star @excel.tr, who has amassed over 130,000 TikTok followers; "Excel pra Ontem," a TikToker with almost 300,000 followers who makes tutorials in Portuguese; and the Vietnamese-speaking video maker @exceltips211, who has garnered over 150,000 followers.

@elingefrancisco Cálculo de margen de utilidad… #elingefrancisco #aprendeentiktok #excel ♬ sonido original - Francisco Terán

"The Excel online space is something that's been growing more robustly," Norton told The Verge. "I think that it's always going to be around in some way, shape, or form. There will be people in the spreadsheets and it will just keep moving along."

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.