Are our old spreadsheets worth anything to AI companies?

Spreadsheets can qualify when estimates, job costs and schedules preserve years of decisions and their outcomes. As of October 2026, eight providers name spreadsheets or a spreadsheet system.

What use is an estimating or job-cost sheet to an AI company?

To train and test models on the work spreadsheets hold. OpenAI’s GDPval benchmark (September 25, 2025) grades models on tasks where “Every task is based on real work products” and the expected deliverables “span documents, slides, diagrams, spreadsheets, and multimedia”. Those tasks were written by professionals who averaged 14 years of experience, so they show the kind of work model builders measure rather than records bought from a company.

Among the providers that license business records, Telegraph Lab (affiliated with Data Licensing Report) says its company-drives category covers “The work itself, including project documents, spreadsheets, designs, and technical files”, with XLSX among the formats. Polyshares counts spreadsheets in the working record of a business, beside Slack, email and Drive, in its homepage FAQ (both as of October 2026). Appen groups templates with the procedures that define how a task is meant to run, and an estimating template is one, since it lays out the quantities, rates and markups your estimators apply.

Which of our spreadsheets count for more?

The ones that record a decision and can be tied to what followed. Miro Advisory’s card for documents and cloud storage, which names Excel and Sheets, reads “Most useful when a document can be connected to the workflow and decision that produced it”. Nyne and Scale AI name Excel and Sheets and say file contents come with metadata, authorship and timestamps.

Sheet	What it records	What makes it count for more
Estimates and bids	Quantities, unit costs, markup and the price quoted	A copy kept for each job, with won or lost and the final price noted
Job costing	Budget against actual cost, by job and cost code	The same job numbers the estimate and the accounting system use
Schedules	Crews, dates and the order of work	Planned dates that can be set beside the dates jobs finished
Price lists	Your own prices by item and date	Dated versions that show how prices moved
Trackers	Warranty claims, punch items, leads, receivables	A date, an owner and an outcome on each line

Some sheets need a different description. A sheet pasted out of QuickBooks or ServiceTitan repeats records the system already holds, so the accounting records page and the system itself are the better source. A contact list kept as a sheet is CRM data and raises the same questions as the CRM page. A blank template shows the method but no jobs.

Keep the original workbooks beside any CSV sample. Microsoft says CSV saves only the active sheet. Its format guide says CSV saves the text and values displayed in cells; formulas displayed instead of their results become text. Formatting and other worksheet features are lost. Export each tab separately for a sample, while keeping the workbook’s formulas and structure for a buyer’s later review.

Which buyers name spreadsheets?

Eight, as of October 2026. A provider qualifies for this table when its own pages name spreadsheets, Excel, Google Sheets, Smartsheet or XLSX as a source. The same rule applies to all 25 providers.

Provider	What it is	What its own pages name
Corpus	Licenses directly	Smartsheet among its planning and project systems
Miro Advisory	Introducer; does not buy data	“Word, Excel, Docs, Sheets” on its documents and cloud storage card
Nyne	Licenses directly	Excel and Sheets under documents, slides and files
Polyshares	Licenses directly	“spreadsheets” in its answer to what counts as operational data
Replay	Licenses directly	Google Sheets among the sources it shows AI buyers
Scale AI	Licenses directly	Excel and Sheets under documents, slides and files
Sell My Business Data	Introducer	Spreadsheets among the files on its company-drives card
Telegraph Lab (affiliated)	Licenses directly	“spreadsheets” on its company-drives card, with XLSX among the formats

A broad invitation for documents or drive files does not establish a spreadsheet requirement. The documents page covers those wider categories, and the buyers directory explains each provider’s payment model.

Where do old spreadsheets sit, and how far back can we count?

Check shared drives, personal drives and email attachments; their history is different.

• Shared drives. Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox and Box each keep earlier versions and deleted files for set periods, compared on the documents page.
• Google Sheets. Besides its version history, a sheet keeps a trail for each cell: right-click it and choose Show edit history to see who changed it. Google warns that “Some changes might not show up in the edit history”, among them added or deleted rows and changes made by formulas.
• Personal drives of people who left. Estimators may have kept their own copies. Google’s and Microsoft’s rules for a departed user’s files are on the system pages for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
• Email. Estimates and price lists sent to customers and suppliers may survive as attachments (email).
• An old file server or backup drive. These are covered under old systems.

The years are harder to count than the files. A file’s modified date shows its last save, so a 2014 estimate reopened and saved in 2022 counts as 2022. Job numbers or dates in file names and inside the sheets are a better guide, and a date column in a CSV lets the sample tool count rows by month when it can read the format.

A provider that wants to read your drive through an app, instead of taking files, works under Google’s and Microsoft’s developer rules; the pages on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 explain them.

Our bid sheets and price lists are our edge. Should they go out at all?

You can exclude a folder, sheet or column. Federal trade-secret law covers financial and business information, including formulas and compilations, when it has economic value from being secret and the owner takes reasonable steps to protect it. A licensing agreement’s confidentiality and use terms matter to that protection. State how the license protects bid logic and pricing before including them.

Pricing does not have to travel with every sheet.

• Leave it out. Bid and price-list folders can stay out of scope entirely (leaving out records).
• Keep the sheets, drop the amounts. The sample tool leaves prices and totals in unless you switch off Keep money amounts, which turns them into [AMOUNT]; you can also untick whole columns.
• Separate other people’s prices. Supplier quotes and price lists you received are governed by the terms they came with, as the documents page explains.

For whether a competitor could still recognize your numbers, see what “anonymized” means.

What personal information turns up in spreadsheets?

Names and contact details can appear in cells, while a workbook can also carry hidden content and author information.

• Employees. Pay rates, hours and Social Security numbers in payroll and HR sheets. The accounting records page covers how providers say they handle payroll detail.
• Customers. Names, addresses and phone numbers in estimate logs and lead trackers.
• Hidden content and metadata. Microsoft’s workbook-inspection guide names comments, author information, hidden rows, columns and worksheets. Other people can unhide the content. Google Sheets also has cell edit history. A CSV of one sheet leaves other tabs behind; a complete workbook retains them.

In a CSV sample, the tool replaces names found in recognized columns wherever they recur, and catches email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, dashed or labelled Social Security numbers and card numbers that pass a Luhn check. A name typed into a notes column is caught only if it also appears in a recognized column, if you add it under Your own terms, or if you turn on free-text name detection. Read every sample row before it goes anywhere.

Is there a going rate for old spreadsheets?

The eight providers above give no comparable spreadsheet-only transaction price as of October 2026. An offer needs to specify which workbooks and history it covers. How much is my company’s data worth? lists what providers publish for whole companies.

For a buyer, describe how many workbooks of each kind you hold, which years they cover, whether estimates record won or lost and job-cost sheets record actual cost, and which folders stay out. Note those in your data inventory beside the email, drives and accounting system the sheets refer to.