By Hiran de Silva
Mark Proctor, a respected Excel expert and Microsoft MVP, has remarked on a puzzling phenomenon: the surprisingly low demand for training in Excel’s modern features – Power Query, Power Pivot, Dynamic Arrays, Office Scripts, and more.
From the viewpoint of an Excel educator or social media trainer, this seems counterintuitive. Excel is getting more powerful; surely, users and companies should be clamoring to master the new functions?
But from the perspective of management, the indifference is not only understandable – it’s rational. It reflects a deep misalignment between what’s being taught, who it’s for, and what the business actually needs.
Let me explain using a model I call the Purple Squares Sketch.
The Purple Squares Sketch
Imagine a company’s operations as a giant wall that needs to be painted purple.
Now imagine that every employee is placed inside a one-centimetre square box, their job being to paint the interior of that square. Their training, tools, and thinking are all shaped by the assumption that this square is their responsibility. If they need to collaborate, they pass things physically between boxes – like emailing spreadsheets or sharing files on SharePoint.
This is how most people think about Excel. It’s a tool for my task – a means to automate my corner of the process.
But management has a very different perspective. They’re not trying to paint one square. They’re trying to paint the entire wall — quickly, efficiently, and consistently.
From this view, training people to individually perfect their one-centimetre box – using ever more complex brushes and techniques – doesn’t scale. It doesn’t solve the enterprise problem. What management really wants is a spray gun: a coordinated, engineered process that handles the wall as a system, not a series of boxes.
And that’s where most Excel training falls flat. It’s teaching brush technique to people in boxes, when what’s needed is process engineering from the top down.
1. Modern Features Don’t Solve the Management Problem
To someone in a purple square, a new brush (Power Query, LET, or LAMBDA) may seem magical. But management isn’t asking for better brushes. They’re asking:
- Why is this process so slow?
- Why are we chasing spreadsheets from 300 users?
- Why can’t we trust this report?
- Why can’t the workflow be automated, consistent, and auditable?
Modern Excel features don’t address these questions unless they’re applied within an architecture designed for collaboration and control. That requires stepping outside the square – something most training doesn’t do.
2. No Training in Enterprise Spreadsheet Architecture
Most Excel training is built for people painting inside the square.
But businesses run on interconnected processes, not isolated tasks. From budgeting to reconciliations to operations reporting, the real need is architecture: structured flows of data, logic, controls, and integration across many roles and systems.
What Excel needs is training in:
- Hub-and-spoke models
- Central data control
- Read/write database flows
- Automated consolidation
- Governance and auditability
These topics are almost entirely absent from modern Excel training – especially the social media content that dominates the conversation.
And so, from management’s perspective, current training doesn’t address business transformation. It’s not a spray gun – it’s a prettier paintbrush.
3. Excel Feature Marketing: The Wrong Product for the Right Problem
Microsoft and the influencer ecosystem have marketed Excel’s new features as exciting upgrades for individuals – and they are. But management isn’t asking for excitement. They’re asking for risk reduction, consistency, and control at scale.
A new Excel function doesn’t move the needle unless it improves:
- Speed of delivery
- Quality of reporting
- Data lineage and traceability
- Reduced overhead in reconciliation
- Fewer points of failure
When new features are taught in the context of the purple square – “Here’s how YOU can automate YOUR task” – they don’t appeal to those whose job is to paint the wall.
4. Excel Is Already the Backbone – Quietly
Ironically, Excel often is the enterprise backbone. But when it works, it’s invisible. Processes run. Reports appear. Numbers get signed off. From management’s point of view, nothing is broken.
So, they don’t ask whether a spreadsheet uses Power Query or ADO or pivot tables. They care about the outcome. And if a 400-person budgeting process works – even if it’s inefficient behind the scenes – there’s no incentive to replace it, let alone to train people on features they don’t associate with that outcome.
Without a clear connection to enterprise value, feature training looks like square-painting, not wall-spraying.
5. Misaligned Incentives and Fractured Communication
Enterprise training budgets are shaped by:
- Regulatory requirements
- Systems changeovers
- Risk audits
- Strategic projects
Training in Power Query or Dynamic Arrays doesn’t naturally fit into any of those. And because few Excel educators are speaking to business outcomes, management doesn’t see a return on investment.
Training budgets follow transformation. But most Excel training still follows tasks.
6. Apathy Toward Management Needs Within the Excel Community
There’s a deeper problem: the Excel community itself often shows little interest in what management actually needs.
In a recent Power Query challenge I shared on LinkedIn, there was tremendous engagement – as long as the question was framed as a technical puzzle. But when the solution was presented in the context of end-to-end management requirements – including reporting, control, and user participation at scale – the engagement evaporated.
The message this sends to management is clear: even skilled Excel professionals may not be interested in the bigger picture. And if the people who know Excel best show no concern for operational efficiency, auditability, or business fit, why would management look to them for solutions?
This is a fundamental barrier to trust – and a core reason training demand remains low.
7. Management’s Growing Concern: Excel Hell
From management’s perspective, Excel’s growing complexity – especially when wielded by individuals without architectural oversight – leads directly to what’s known as Excel Hell:
- Dozens of files in circulation.
- Logic duplicated across workbooks.
- No audit trail.
- No governance.
- High dependency on individual “Excel gurus” and their undocumented formulas.
Ironically, this is exactly the picture painted by vendors who seek to replace Excel. Their marketing campaigns thrive on these horror stories. But here’s the kicker: these same vendors often fail to match the flexibility and power of Excel when properly architected for the enterprise.
In other words, the real Excel problem is not Excel itself – it’s the absence of a scalable design approach. And the complexity that arises when individuals apply ever more advanced techniques within their purple squares is only making it worse.
Until the Excel community acknowledges this and offers enterprise-scale alternatives, the industry that demonizes Excel will continue to gain ground – not because their products are better, but because Excel is being misused.
Conclusion: To Drive Demand, Change the Conversation
Mark Proctor is right: demand for modern Excel training is low. But that’s not because Excel is irrelevant – it’s because the training is.
If Excel educators want management’s attention, they must:
- Speak in the language of outcomes
- Show how Excel can support enterprise-scale operations
- Frame their teaching in terms of governance, reliability, and speed
- And above all, get out of the purple square and teach how to paint the wall
Until that happens, managers will continue to watch the Excel world upgrade its brushes – while quietly wondering when someone will finally bring them the spray gun.
Author’s Note:
Hiran de Silva is an enterprise Excel consultant who helps organizations redesign spreadsheet-based processes using hub-and-spoke architecture, SQL integration, and scalable controls – transforming chaotic Excel workflows into strategic business systems.
ABSTRACT
Management Indifference to Modern Excel Training
This article addresses the apparent lack of demand for modern Excel training from a management perspective. The author suggests that while individual users may benefit from learning new features like Power Query or Dynamic Arrays, management is more concerned with solving company-wide operational problems rather than improving individual tasks. Using the “Purple Squares Sketch” analogy, the piece explains that current training focuses on improving individual “squares,” whereas management needs solutions that can address the entire “wall” or process. The author argues that management seeks enterprise-level architectural solutions for data management and reporting, topics largely absent from popular Excel training, leading to a misalignment between training content and business needs.
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