Episode 1 — US Search Demand for Spreadsheet Templates: What 1,008 Keywords Show

Published September 20, 2026 · 7 min 33 s · Download the MP3 · RSS feed

Narrated with a synthetic voice. This episode is read by a text-to-speech voice, not by a human presenter. The dataset, the category labels and the analysis are ours; the source file is the published CSV and nothing in the script comes from outside it.

Full transcript

You are listening to TableTemplates Data Notes, the show where we open one published dataset per episode and read what is actually in it. I am Marcel Guerfani. Two disclosures before we start. This episode is narrated with a synthetic voice. And every figure you will hear comes from a single file we publish openly under a Creative Commons Attribution license: our dataset of United States search demand for spreadsheet templates. Nothing in this episode comes from outside that file.

Here is the object itself. It is a CSV with 1,008 rows. Each row is a keyword someone types into a search engine, with five fields: the keyword, an estimated monthly search volume in the United States, a category label we assigned, a yes-or-no flag for whether we publish a free template that answers it, and the link to that template when we do. Add up the volume column across all 1,008 rows and you get 200,090 searches a month. Those rows are sorted into 16 categories. That is the entire dataset: one number per keyword, one label per keyword.

A word on what that volume number is and is not. It is an estimate of monthly searches, of the kind keyword tools produce. It is not a count of clicks, not a count of buyers, and not revenue. It is also a snapshot with no time dimension, so there is no seasonality in the file: a tax keyword and a wedding keyword are both shown at a flat monthly rate. Treat it as the relative size of intentions, not as a forecast.

So what is the shape of this demand? Far more lopsided than the total suggests. The median keyword in the file draws 70 searches a month. The largest single keyword, excel accounting software, draws 8,250. The smallest rows sit at 10 searches a month, and there are 145 of them. The 10 biggest keywords together account for 47,600 searches, which is 23.8 percent of all the demand in the file. Widen that to the 50 biggest and you reach 48.4 percent. Close to half of this market is carried by 50 phrases out of 1,008.

The other end matters just as much. 557 keywords, more than half the file, draw fewer than 100 searches a month each. All of them together add up to 19,070 searches, which is 9.5 percent of the total. That is the long tail in one sentence: it is where most of the vocabulary lives, and where very little of the volume does.

Now the categories. Project management is the largest by volume: 32,240 searches a month, 16.1 percent of the file, spread across 130 keywords. Bookkeeping and accounting is second at 24,180 searches, 12.1 percent, but it gets there with only 45 keywords. That is the more interesting comparison. Bookkeeping averages 537 searches per keyword; project management averages 248. Two categories in the same neighborhood of total demand, built in two completely different ways. One is deep, the other is wide.

Behind those two, four categories cluster tightly: customer relationship and sales tracking at 20,330 searches, human resources, scheduling and payroll at 20,220, budgeting and personal finance at 20,020, and invoicing, purchase orders and quotes at 16,840. There is no single dominant business use case here. There are four separate ones of almost identical size.

Three things in this file surprised me. The first is the health, habits and home category. It carries 87 keywords, the fifth-largest keyword count in the dataset, and all of them together account for 7,970 searches a month. That is an average of 92 searches per keyword. Its own top phrase, weekly meal planner template excel, draws 890. Many distinct ways to ask, very little volume behind any one of them.

The second surprise sits inside project management, the biggest category. If you had asked me to name the phrase that drives spreadsheet project management demand, I would have said gantt chart. In this file, the word gantt appears in 4 keywords, worth 140 searches a month combined, inside a category worth 32,240. The actual leader is excel task tracker, at 3,530. People are not asking for a methodology. They are asking for a list with owners and dates on it.

The third surprise is the word free. It appears in only 65 of the 1,008 keywords, worth 8,380 searches, or 4.2 percent of the demand in the file. Searchers mostly do not type it. Meanwhile, 146 keywords, representing 18.6 percent of total volume, are ones where a free template already exists on our side. The appetite for something free is real. The word free is mostly not how it gets expressed.

One more structural fact, and it is the one I would keep if I could keep only one. The word excel appears in 577 of the 1,008 keywords, and those keywords carry 132,330 searches a month, which is 66.1 percent of everything in the file. Two thirds of this demand names the application by name rather than describing the job to be done.

A caution about the category labels, because they are ours and not the searcher's. The top keyword in the weddings and events category is birthday templates, at 1,300 searches a month. Grouping those together is defensible, since both are personal celebration planning, but it is a judgment call. Treat every category total, including the ones I just read out, as a total of our labels rather than a natural boundary in the market.

The honest limits, in one block. The volumes are third-party estimates and they are rounded. The keyword list is one we assembled, so it is not exhaustive and it is not a census of the market. The categories are our labels. And there is no time dimension, so nothing in this file says whether any of this is growing or shrinking. What the file does support is everything you heard today, and all of it is reproducible: take the CSV, sum the column, and you will land on the same numbers.

The dataset, the method and ready-made citation formats are on tabletemplates.com, on the research page and the cite this data page. The full transcript of this episode, with every figure written out, is on the episode page. This has been TableTemplates Data Notes. Thanks for listening.

Sources and reuse

The dataset is published under CC BY 4.0. Download it, check any figure in this transcript against it, and reuse it with attribution:

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