Paul Barnhurst has just posted a list of Excel educators—Mark Proctor among them—urging followers to learn from these individuals to improve their Excel skills. On the surface, this seems like a useful recommendation. These content creators are undeniably skilled, polished, and persuasive. But there’s a fundamental issue with the type of Excel being promoted.

All the figures in Barnhurst’s list focus on Excel as a standalone tool—single-user spreadsheets tackling local, isolated problems on a single machine. That’s a perfectly valid use case for many. But here’s the problem: most people learning Excel today aren’t doing it for hobbyist projects or small shop operations. They’re preparing for careers in businesses where Excel is embedded within collaborative, enterprise-wide processes.

The Purple Squares Problem

If Excel is taught and practiced only in a “paint inside the box” fashion—focused on isolated cells, sheets, or tasks—then users naturally build spreadsheets that reflect that mindset. Unfortunately, that narrow scope doesn’t align with how Excel is actually used in organizations. From a management perspective, those purple squares are just fragments. Management doesn’t want isolated patches of purple; they want the entire wall painted—efficiently and consistently. That calls for architectural thinking, not just formula tricks.

In the metaphor I often use, the task isn’t to fill squares one at a time—it’s to spray-paint the entire wall purple. And that requires a completely different approach to Excel—one based on client-server thinking, data architecture, and automation across teams and systems.

The Real-World Cost of “Inside the Box” Thinking

Barnhurst, ironically, is also the founder of FP&A Today, a platform where FP&A tool vendors routinely claim Excel is unfit for enterprise use. Why do they say that? Because most Excel solutions in the wild are inefficient: they’re full of manual processes, error-prone links, orphaned workbooks, and fragmented logic no one can follow after the original creator moves on.

But here’s the twist: that clunky chaos isn’t Excel’s fault.

It’s the result of how Excel is taught—by people who’ve only ever used it inside the purple squares. So the teaching leads to clunky spreadsheets, which the vendors then use as proof that Excel can’t do the job. A cycle of miseducation and misrepresentation ensues.

The Industry’s Vicious Feedback Loop

So what are we left with? A strange situation. Influencers like Mark Proctor teach purple-square Excel. Barnhurst promotes those influencers. Then the very tools featured on FP&A Today swoop in to say, “See? Excel’s a disaster. You need our product instead.”

It’s a beautifully engineered feedback loop. But the reality is damning. The reason Excel looks bad in the enterprise is because the very influencers being promoted never teach enterprise architecture in the first place. No hub-and-spoke design. No relational thinking. No client-server methodology. Just more colorful formulas, more Power Query tricks, and more tutorials that ignore the bigger picture.

Are They Inadvertently Leading You Off a Cliff?

This is where the cliff-edge metaphor comes in. Imagine a cartoon kiosk with a sign: “Easy Excel Tips — This Way.” Behind it, Paul Barnhurst, waving folks forward. Down the road they go, where spreadsheets become increasingly convoluted and unscalable—until they fall right off the cliff into “Excel Hell.”

Waiting at the bottom? FP&A vendors, circling like vultures. “See?” they say. “Told you Excel can’t handle the job.”

But what if there were a third option? A path that isn’t “Easy But Wrong” or “Hard But Unknown.” A method grounded in experience, scale, and architectural thinking—one that transforms Excel from a local paintbrush into a spray gun for the enterprise wall.

The Unpopular Truth

Let’s be clear: this critique won’t be welcomed by the Excel influencer community. After all, their business model thrives on delivering quick tips and easy wins—wrapped in social media engagement metrics. But if we’re honest, the “purple squares” model creates spreadsheets that are destined to break when scaled.

It’s not that these teachers are malicious—they’re just not enterprise builders. That’s fine, as long as the context is made explicit. But it rarely is. And that’s a problem.

A Final Thought

I recently created a screenplay comparing two approaches to account reconciliation. One followed a popular influencer’s YouTube tutorial—full of isolated logic and inefficient techniques. The other used a structured, auditable, and automated method appropriate for enterprise use. The difference was night and day.

Yet the inefficient version had thousands of likes and no critique—because it looked good and solved a narrow problem. That’s not education. That’s marketing.

Conclusion

This “rant” was sparked by a seemingly harmless post by Paul Barnhurst, but it reveals a deeper pattern. When Excel is taught only as a local tool, it fails as an enterprise tool. And then the industry steps in to declare Excel dead. It’s a setup—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But here’s the good news: there is another way. And I’ll keep showing it, even if the influencers don’t.

The question is, do you want to follow the crowd to the cliff edge—or spray the wall purple and show what Excel can really do?

Author’s Note: This article was triggered by Paul Barnhurst’s promotion of Mark Proctor and others in the Excel teaching space, many of whom excel at teaching purple-square logic—but not enterprise strategy.

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