Earlier today, I posted on LinkedIn about creative thinking with Excel. As I anticipated, most of the comments have interpreted “creative thinking” to mean simply using Excel’s features in inventive ways within its confines. This interpretation is valid but not what I intended. The real focus of my post was on thinking laterally—looking at the bigger picture and not being constrained by Excel’s familiar boundaries. This distinction is critical when we talk about truly innovative solutions for businesses using Excel.
To clarify, if by “creative” you mean finding clever ways to use Excel’s buttons and features within its existing structure, that’s a kind of creativity—but it’s limited. It’s creativity inside the box, within a confined space. What I’m referring to, however, is thinking so far outside the box that we don’t even see the box anymore. It’s about breaking free from traditional methods, leveraging Excel as a tool to interact with systems and data that extend far beyond its original design.
This is where Excel’s real power lies—Microsoft’s Office suite, engineered in the 1990s, integrated seamlessly with external systems like databases, opening up possibilities for enterprise-level solutions. Excel isn’t just a standalone tool; it’s a gateway to broader systems, capable of scaling processes across an organization. Yet, despite this, many Excel users, even those who claim to think outside the box, often remain confined to its inherent boundaries, oblivious to the wider potential.
Take Power Query, for example. It’s undoubtedly one of the most publicized features in recent years, hailed as a game-changer. And in many respects, it is—but within a limited scope. The majority of Power Query solutions promoted on social media focus on solving relatively small-scale, isolated problems. My question to those Power Query influencers and trainers is simple: Can you show me a solution where Power Query was applied in a real-life, enterprise environment that required collaborative working and ongoing processes?
To date, I have yet to see a single example from any of these so-called experts where Power Query has been effectively implemented for a sustainable, systematized process at an enterprise level. This is crucial. Many popular Excel solutions are one-time fixes or standalone tricks that don’t translate into long-term, scalable systems. It’s easy to generate social media content showing flashy Excel features, but real creativity involves crafting robust, repeatable processes that function across an entire organization, month after month, year after year.
This lack of real-world application is even more glaring when we challenge alternatives to Excel, such as Anaplan or Workday. When we ask these vendors to show us how their product solves large-scale budgeting processes, they often come up short. Sure, they might claim their solution is better suited for enterprise needs, but when pressed for specifics, they can rarely deliver a comparable result. And when I point out that the problem I’m presenting is a composite of challenges I’ve encountered throughout my career, they argue that the scenario is “cooked up.” But it’s not—these are real challenges faced by organizations, and my solutions using Excel have proven to be both effective and scalable.
To level the playing field, I’ve even offered to take their requirements and demonstrate how they can be solved using Excel and cloud-based solutions. Yet, when it comes down to the details, these alternative providers often back out of the conversation.
This isn’t just an issue with alternative software vendors—this challenge extends to social media influencers who promote Excel techniques that fall apart when scaled for enterprise use. Many of these influencers, despite claiming expertise, have likely never worked in a situation where they had to answer to a risk management team or internal auditors, proving their system is robust, auditable, and sustainable over time. If they had, they’d understand that these solutions require a completely different mindset—a mindset of creative thinking that extends beyond Excel’s buttons and features.
The kind of creative thinking I’m advocating for is about breaking down those internal boundaries and looking at how Excel fits into the broader enterprise architecture. It’s about translating small-scale techniques into scalable, sustainable solutions that support ongoing processes across an entire company.
To demonstrate this, we need to pull examples from both the Excel-bashing industry and those promoting so-called “modern Excel” solutions. Many of these techniques are designed to generate social media buzz rather than address practical, real-world challenges. It’s time we cut through the noise and address the heart of the issue: Excel is not just a creative tool inside the box—it’s a tool that, when used creatively, transcends the box entirely.
This conversation may be controversial, but it’s a serious one. If we’re going to continue to use Excel in business-critical processes, we must shift from thinking about creative button-clicking to thinking about sustainable, enterprise-level solutions. That’s the real creative thinking we need.
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