By Hiran de Silva

Introduction

The suggestion by Mark Proctor that Excel skills are increasingly settling into the lowest common skill set is not just a cynical take—it’s a sobering observation backed by the evolution of how Excel is taught, discussed, and valued. For decades, Excel has been a professional workhorse—an adaptable platform capable of supporting critical business processes at scale. But today, much of the public conversation around Excel has been hijacked by social media trends, influencer branding, and performative tutorials optimized for clicks, not competence.

This isn’t simply a generational shift in content style. It’s a structural decline in standards. And it’s measurable, visible, and deeply consequential for organizations that depend on Excel not as a toy, but as a foundational part of their workflow infrastructure.

The Professional vs. Popular Divide

There has long been a healthy tension between two styles of Excel usage:

1. Professional Excel — focused on business logic, process automation, database integration, and repeatable workflows, often at departmental or enterprise scale.
2. Popular Excel — geared toward quick tricks, standalone tasks, and formula acrobatics, typically showcased in 60-second tutorial reels or gamified “Excel challenges.”

In the early 2000s, Excel was quietly powering everything from multinational budgets to bank reconciliations to logistical supply chains. Solutions were often bespoke, but they were engineered with rigour—VBA automations, SQL integrations, modular templates, structured planning tools.

Fast forward to today, and you’ll see Excel being presented less as a business platform and more as a playground for increasingly flashy—but increasingly isolated—features. Features that often solve invented problems with unnecessary complexity, packaged as “hacks” to impress the algorithm.

Social Media: The Accelerant of Decline

What caused the shift? One of the most powerful forces has been social media virality. Excel creators online are rewarded not for teaching transferable business practices, but for grabbing attention. The incentives are clear: the more unusual the solution, the better. The more obscure the function, the more impressive. The more convoluted the formula, the more likely it will be reposted as “next-level Excel.”

But business problems don’t care about viral formulas—they care about clarity, accountability, and maintainability. And when Excel is reframed as a vehicle for personal brand-building rather than business transformation, the real skillsets—process design, architecture, modularity, database logic—are crowded out of the conversation.

Symptoms of the Dumbing Down

Several clear symptoms show the dumbing down in practice:

• The Rise of “Function Chasing”: A growing fixation on newly released Excel functions (e.g. LET, LAMBDA, TEXTSPLIT) as ends in themselves, rather than tools within a broader process architecture.
• The Disappearance of VBA: Despite being the only way to automate entire workflows natively in Excel, VBA has been framed as “legacy” or “obsolete”—often by those who’ve never used it at scale. This has resulted in a generation of Excel users who don’t know how to create buttons, user forms, or automation sequences that drive real business value.
• Context-Free Tutorials: Most popular Excel content is designed to be consumed without context. But Excel without context is Excel without purpose. A pivot table demo is meaningless unless you understand the business objective behind the summary.
• Neglect of Enterprise Use Cases: There is virtually no discussion in popular Excel circles about scalable design: hub-and-spoke architectures, Access/SQL back-ends, security protocols, or interdepartmental data flows.
• The Myth of “Modern Excel” as Superior: “Modern Excel” is often code for “functions released after 2018.” But many of these are solving problems that professionals have addressed more cleanly with databases and VBA for 20 years. The insistence that these functions are better often stems not from evidence, but from a generational disconnect with how real businesses run.

The Unspoken Risk to Organizations

Organizations that rely on Excel as a cornerstone of their operations are increasingly at risk of hiring from a talent pool trained in the shallow end of the Excel spectrum. Hiring managers are bombarded with CVs boasting “Power Query proficiency” and “dynamic arrays mastery,” but these skills often fail in the real world, where automation, integration, and governance are the priority.

Ironically, many of these organizations already have sprawling, multi-user Excel processes that were built years ago—often by one person with a deep understanding of VBA, databases, and business logic. And now, there’s no one left who understands how they work. The new generation was trained to perform for followers, not for finance departments.

How the Slide Began

This shift didn’t happen overnight. It began when Excel education moved from internal business training programs to external platforms optimized for engagement. Once Excel became a YouTube category and a LinkedIn badge, the incentives changed. Entertaining became more important than educating. Techniques became stylized performances.

This isn’t the fault of any one person. It’s the inevitable outcome of content-driven algorithms shaping how people learn. But the result is a profession slowly forgetting its own foundations.

What Needs to Change

If we are to recover Excel’s full potential, we must reintroduce professional discipline into the conversation. This means:

• Teaching with context: Always explain the business process behind the Excel technique.
• Valuing architecture over acrobatics: Promote modular, maintainable solutions that scale.
• Bringing back VBA and ADO: Not as old tools, but as core pillars of enterprise-level automation.
• Encouraging end-to-end thinking: From data entry to report generation to audit trail.
• Challenging influencer incentives: Reward practicality, not performativity.

Conclusion

Excel isn’t dumb. It’s being dumbed down—by a system that elevates views over value. But behind the viral tricks, Excel’s true power still lies waiting: in the hands of professionals who know how to architect, not just demonstrate.

It’s time to recover that standard. Not just for the sake of Excel, but for the organizations quietly depending on it to work properly—even if no one on TikTok is watching.

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