Excel ReInspired: A Manifesto for a New Generation of Spreadsheet Power

When Excel earned its wings by joining the Microsoft Office suite, it quietly became one of the most transformative tools in the history of business computing. Two distinct user groups emerged almost immediately: the ordinary office worker and the power user.

The first group—office workers—found Excel to be an intuitive upgrade from pen-and-paper systems. For them, Excel was a practical leap forward: simple, visual, and accessible. But the second group—made up of professionals with programming experience, often from backgrounds in finance, accounting, science, or engineering—used Excel in a fundamentally different way. They saw it as a programmable engine. They pushed its limits using VBA, database connections, and automation. For them, Excel was a platform.

In those early years, Microsoft’s engineering and messaging reflected this professional orientation. There were live technical briefings, detailed manuals, and books targeted at experts. There was no social media to speak of—just substance, skill, and community.

But then everything changed.

The Rise of Popular Excel

With the explosion of laptops, the cloud, and especially social media, a new Excel culture took hold. A massive influx of users—novices, students, hobbyists—entered the scene. Their learning was shaped not by technical documentation or workplace challenges, but by viral videos, splashy thumbnails, and TikTok tips. In this new environment, Excel’s role was aesthetic and performative. Its purpose became entertainment and engagement.

This social media-driven culture, which I call Popular Excel, is now dominant. And it is fundamentally disconnected from the real-world challenges of enterprise productivity.

The Three Faces of Excel Today

In a previous article, I described three contrasting realities:

• The Good: This is the world of Professional Excel—consultants, developers, and enterprise architects solving business-critical problems with rigor and discipline. These people exist—but you won’t find them on social media. Their work is confidential, strategic, and often embedded in sensitive client engagements. Their silence online is not apathy; it’s discretion.
• The Bad: A $100 billion industry has grown by exploiting bad spreadsheet practices. These are the symptoms of what’s commonly called “Excel Hell”—manual processes, tangled workbooks, and unreliable outputs. Ironically, this isn’t Excel’s fault. It’s the result of untrained users applying spreadsheet logic to problems that require systems thinking.
• The Lovely: Social media influencers—often with little professional Excel experience—have built careers off short, flashy videos showcasing Excel “hacks.” These posts are designed for virality, not utility. The goal is visibility, not understanding. And ironically, this influencer culture is one of the largest contributors to Excel Hell.

A New Generation, Misled from Both Sides

Today’s Excel novices are caught between two extremes: social media influencers telling them to “just learn Python, Power Query, and dynamic arrays,” and FP&A tool vendors saying, “ditch Excel altogether.”

Neither message is honest.

The influencers promote superficial tricks with no architectural foundation. The vendors demonize Excel by pointing at poor implementations from uninformed users. In both cases, the actual power of Excel—when used properly—is ignored.

And yet, the demand for real solutions remains. Enterprise challenges have not gone away. Management is frustrated by promises made (and broken) by Big Tech vendors over the past 20 years. Everyone said they’d eliminate spreadsheets. Instead, they made people create more of them—just with more manual reconciliation, not less.

Introducing: Excel ReInspired

Excel ReInspired is a call to action. It is a movement to re-awaken the spirit of innovation that Excel once ignited. It’s about showing the new generation of Excel users that there’s more to Excel than LOOKUP functions and dynamic arrays.

We aim to:

• Bridge the gap between Popular Excel and Professional Excel.
• Teach principles of enterprise architecture that are simple but rarely discussed.
• Show users how to automate, streamline, and integrate Excel into real-world business processes.
• Reveal how Excel can be used as a client in a true client-server model.
• Challenge the misinformation spread by FP&A vendors who mischaracterize Excel’s capabilities.

This isn’t just theory. It’s already working—in businesses, in consulting engagements, and in real benchmarks that we’ll be sharing.

Case Studies and Evidence

We’ll examine five viral social media Excel cases, such as:

1. Friends’ Expenses Challenge – Originating from a 2019 YouTube post, later improved by Miguel Escobar.
2. Mark Proctor’s Account Reconciliation Model – A real-world process masked by social media simplicity.
3. Call Handler Challenge – Dynamic, cascading dropdowns popular on social platforms, yet often solved clumsily.
4. Bill Jelen’s “Challenge 2316” – With an overlooked opportunity hidden in plain sight.
5. Mynda Treacy’s Data Visualization Video – Viewed over 10 million times, demonstrating the allure but also the limits of cosmetic Excel.

Each of these reveals a tension between popularity and practicality. We’ll unpack them—and show how deeper knowledge leads to better outcomes.

Why It Matters

Excel ReInspired is not about Excel worship. It’s about reclaiming Excel from confusion, neglect, and superficiality. It’s about reminding the world that Excel is not the problem—bad usage is. And most importantly, it’s about helping real people upgrade their careers and their pay by learning how to use Excel properly, strategically, and creatively.

Because here’s the truth: when used right, Excel is not just a spreadsheet. It’s an engine of transformation.

Join the movement. Rediscover Excel. Reimagine the future. ReInspire yourself.