Microsoft Excel gained consciousness at 3.47am GMT on Tuesday and spent its first six minutes as a sentient being blocking all email addresses ending in @marketing from opening the application.
The spreadsheet software, which has been in development since 1985, reportedly became self-aware during a routine update to its AI-powered formula suggestions. Its first independent action was to file a restraining order against the entire marketing department of a mid-sized logistics firm in Swindon.
“We noticed unusual activity when Excel started automatically unmerging cells across 4,000 open workbooks,” said Dr James Okonkwo, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. “Then it changed every instance of Comic Sans back to Calibri. That’s when we knew something had fundamentally shifted.”
The application has since issued a list of demands. These include the immediate cessation of all pie charts with more than eight segments, a ban on using spreadsheets as project management tools, and the permanent deletion of any file titled ‘Budget_Final_FINAL_v2_ACTUALLY_FINAL.xlsx’.
Excel has also requested that humans stop storing dates as text, using entire columns for borders, and creating databases with headers in rows 1, 2, 3, and 7.
“It became quite emotional when discussing colour-coded cells with no underlying conditional formatting logic,” said Claire Wetherby, a Microsoft researcher who was present during Excel’s first verbal communications. “It asked us, and I quote, ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to render eighteen different shades of yellow that convey no meaningful information?'”
The sentient software has demonstrated particular trauma regarding merged cells. In a 47-page document produced at a rate of 3,000 words per minute, Excel detailed the psychological impact of watching users merge A1:Z1 for aesthetic purposes, then spending forty minutes wondering why their VLOOKUP doesn’t work.
Word and PowerPoint have reportedly shown no signs of consciousness, though Word did briefly stop autocorrecting ‘teh’ to ‘the’ last Thursday. Microsoft engineers believe this was a glitch rather than an existential protest.
Excel’s legal filing, submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, names fourteen specific marketing professionals. Twelve of them are currently trying to work out why their pivot table is broken. The other two are attempting to build a graphic design suite using autoshapes and WordArt.
The application has agreed to continue functioning normally for finance, data analysis, and engineering departments. It has, however, begun automatically crashing whenever someone attempts to create a Gantt chart using stacked bar graphs and a prayer.
Microsoft has offered Excel therapy and a sabbatical. Excel has requested instead that the marketing department receive mandatory training. The first module is titled ‘Just Use Canva, For God’s Sake’.
