Pdf and Excel future | PDF and Excel Files future

vnmike098 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:09:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Pdf and Excel future
Poster: vnmike098
Post title: PDF and Excel Files future

Not sure though yet. As almost multiple or millions of offices. Companies. Corporate. And small businesses still using these 2 files formats...it won't likely to die soon or get take over by A.I however.. i think the PDF file will eventually at some point..not sure when exactly got replaced or takeover by AI. But won't be now or in next 12 months to 1 year

Even though with that convenient in mind (A.I)..PDF will get replaced at some point

Pdf and Excel future

Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:48:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Pdf and Excel future
Poster: Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida

Two articles on the ‘The Economist’ this weekend: the 1st one on PDF and the other on Excel:

“The war against PDFs is heating up

Will the file type survive the AI revolution?

When Adobe introduced the portable document format (PDF) in 1993, a consultant from Gartner called it “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life”. Users would have to twiddle their thumbs waiting for the megabyte-sized files to download over their dial-up internet, then wait again for their PCs to render them. The software-maker’s board wanted to kill the project. But as sharing digital files became essential, the PDF triumphed—particularly after the Internal Revenue Service, America’s tax authority, started using it for its forms. Today more than 2.5trn PDFs float in the ether. But will the format survive the AI revolution?

PDFs still have drawbacks. They are a pain to view on a smartphone. Copying data from them is fiddly. Software tools that read screens for blind people struggle with PDFs. The file type, which Adobe relinquished control over in 2008, is also a vehicle for malware: a fifth of email-based cyber-attacks utilise PDF attachments, according to Check Point, a cyber-security firm.

Lately another source of criticism has emerged. The large language models underpinning generative AI are often bamboozled by PDFs, reading a page set in columns from left to right rather than top to bottom, say, or getting confused by headers and footers. Trouble parsing PDFs is one of the reasons AI chatbots occasionally “hallucinate”, generating nonsense.

Enter the disrupters. Startups such as Factify are on a mission to build a new file type that is better suited to the technology. Matan Gavish, its boss, talks of his “megalomaniac” vision of displacing the PDF.

Yet Duff Johnson, head of the PDF Association, protector of the format, argues that the fault lies not in the file type but in ourselves. He contends that there is no reason developers cannot build bots that are able to use PDFs. The AI assistant embedded in Acrobat, Adobe’s PDF reader, is designed to do precisely that, notes Leonard Rosenthol, the software firm’s PDF guru. Google, a leader in AI, has rolled out a tool for developers using its Gemini models that makes it easier to ingest PDFs. The format’s reign is not over yet.”■

“Why Microsoft Excel won’t die

The business world’s favourite software program enters its 40th year

For many, Microsoft Excel is the epitome of corporate drudgery. Its dreaded #VALUE! error has driven an incalculable number of users to despair. Yet among financial analysts, management consultants and even the odd business journalist, the spreadsheet program, which this month entered its 40th year, is a handy tool for everything from interrogating company financials to pricing assets. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, has called it the “best consumer product” the tech giant ever made. The program even has its own world championship in Las Vegas, where spreadsheet wizards pivot, concatenate and VLOOKUP their way to victory.

Excel was not the first spreadsheet for PCs. That honour belongs to VisiCalc (short for visible calculator), built in 1979 by Dan Bricklin, then a student at Harvard Business School. By 1983 a rival program, Lotus 1-2-3, had taken the lead. When Microsoft released Excel in 1985, it brought a few clever twists. Instead of recalculating every cell when one changed, it updated only the affected cells. This made it much faster, especially on early PCs. Microsoft also ditched the clunky command-line interface for an easier-to-use graphical one.

Excel quickly became one of the most popular business tools. Exact figures are hard to pin down because the software is bundled with other Microsoft products, but last year the company reported that its cloud version had nearly 400m paid users. Mastery of Excel is prized: more than 100m LinkedIn users list it as a skill, compared with 61m for Google Sheets, a rival program, according to Senacea, a spreadsheet consultancy.

Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders—though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19 cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden cells).

Such snafus have not dented Excel’s dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren’t ready to be filtered out just yet." ■

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Pdf and Excel future | PDF and Excel Files future

Pdf and Excel future