Know your sheet
02Case Study — Microsoft 365, 2025
Re-launching Excel
Excel is the most-used productivity product in the world and, on social, the most memed. The relaunch had to make a 40-year-old application feel like a current tool — one Copilot and AI now change every week.
- Role
- Creative Lead, Creators & Social
- Discipline
- Product Relaunch
- Location
- Global
- Duration
- Launch quarter + ongoing
I. The Challenge
Product relaunches for legacy tools usually die in feature-list content. We needed people who already thought they knew Excel to look again and see something different — without patronising the analysts and finance folks who actually live in it.
II. Approach
How we got there.
- 01
Led with what people already do with Excel, not what the product does — creator-led vignettes that showed real workflows getting faster, weirder, more powerful with AI.
- 02
Built a modular social system so every feature drop had a native format ready — vertical explainers, tabletop demos, and receipts-style before/afters.
- 03
Wrote a voice that took Excel seriously as a creative tool, not just an office one, and let the memes land on their own terms.
Social feed
On Instagram.
III. Execution
Creator partnerships across finance, analytics, small business, and creator-economy voices; a matching owned-channel program running the same beats in Microsoft's feeds. Every hero was built to sub-cut into ten social pieces before it left the edit.
IV. Results
- Perception
- Excel back in the modern-tool conversation
- Creator-first
- Native voices before brand voice
- Always-on
- Weekly cadence across every drop
- AI-native
- Copilot moments woven through the system
“Less hair, same love: Satya Nadella reacts to his 32-year-old Microsoft Excel demo going viral — wearing the campaign's 'Making Sheet Happen Since 1985' hoodie.”
V. Credits
- Creative LeadKatie Walmsley
- CreativeIn-house + Assembly
- ClientMicrosoft 365 · Excel
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03Microsoft, 2025
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