In the world of Excel, the word “scalability” is usually where the conversation ends—not begins. Most discussions about Excel’s limitations rely on this assumption: Excel can’t scale. It works for small, personal tasks. But when the demands of enterprise process, multiple users, or live data come into play? Game over. Even Excel’s most vocal proponents—trainers, influencers, and social media personalities—seem to agree. Ironically, they love Excel, but often don’t realize what it can really do.
This article introduces the Reg Call Handler—a thought experiment, challenge, and real-world analogy designed to expose the blind spots in our collective understanding of Excel’s enterprise potential.
A Real-World Origin: The Hospital Bottleneck
Let’s begin with the real-world scenario that inspired it.
A central London teaching hospital—incidentally the same one where Ringo Starr had his tonsils out and where George Orwell died and also was married, and the hospital where I was born. University College Hospital in London, which was also used as the location for the early Doctor movies of the 1950s. Crime novelist Agatha Christie worked there as a volunteer during the war. The hospital once ran its volunteer management on a single Excel spreadsheet. Back in the day, one person could manage this easily. But over time, both the hospital and the volunteer base expanded massively. What was once dozens of volunteers became thousands. And a single spreadsheet—used by multiple rotating volunteers—was now a bottleneck.
Data would arrive from a cloud-based recruitment platform. Volunteers needed processing, inducting, scheduling. Availability fluctuated. Spreadsheets would constantly be locked for editing. Updates were lost. Workarounds were improvised (saving as new versions, writing updates on paper), and the system quickly became unmanageable. Familiar? This is Excel Hell in real life.
From Hospital to Stockroom: Framing the Thought Experiment
To analyze the core problem without getting distracted by healthcare logistics, the scenario was reframed into a stock management case. Enter the Reg Call Handler Excel challenge.
- Imagine one warehouse, one office upstairs, one call handler.
- Customers call to ask about stock.
- The call handler checks a spreadsheet, takes the order, and relays dispatch instructions.
- All smooth—until it isn’t.
Now imagine:
- 20 warehouses across the country.
- 50 call handlers.
- Each call handler has their own order spreadsheet.
- Each must check the latest stock across 20 separate spreadsheets.
- That’s 1,000 potential data connections and spreadsheet sending and receiving. Perhaps once every minute!
You can already see the trainwreck. But rather than propose a solution, the real challenge was aimed at Excel experts and educators online: what do you think of this scenario? Can it be done in Excel?
The Response: Excel Experts Say “No”
The first and loudest response came from Paul Barnhurst, a well-known FP&A voice. His verdict: this isn’t a job for Excel. His solution: use a non-Excel solution. Others piled in—Mark Proctor, Jan Karel Pieterse, Christopher T. Fennell, Brian Spiller. The message was clear: attempting to scale Excel in this way was misguided, irresponsible, even dangerous. The term “hospital pass” was invoked—British rugby slang for a suicidal play. Some suggested Reg, the fictional Excel guru, should simply run.
The consensus was near-universal: Excel can’t scale to this. Don’t try. Just tell management to spend big on something else.
The Twist: Reg Solves It
One week later, a demonstration appeared: a working, robust Excel solution to the problem.
- 50 spreadsheets with cascading dropdowns.
- Live stock data pulled from 20 warehouse spreadsheets effortlessly.
- No duplication. No manual imports. No Power Query.
- All real-time, dynamic, and scalable.
The trick? Excel’s built-in—but widely forgotten—client-server capabilities (aka Hub-and-Spoke), available since the mid-1990s. Using an Access database as a hub, data from all 20 warehouses is centralized. Each of the 50 spreadsheets references the hub. No 1,000 file transfers every minute. Just one version of the truth.
This wasn’t theoretical. It worked. It was demonstrated. But then something even more revealing happened.
Silence
Not one of the original critics returned to the thread to ask:
“How was this done?”
“Can you show us?”
“Is this real?”
No curiosity. No skepticism. No peer review. Nothing. A working prototype disproved the prevailing narrative—and the response was not rebuttal or inquiry. It was silence.
Why?
What Were They Missing?
The key is painfully simple: Excel already supports data communication without sending entire files. The client-server model (where spreadsheets are clients and the hub is the server) has been native to Microsoft Office for over 30 years. This model was publicly demonstrated by Satya Nadella (now Microsoft CEO) as early as 1993 in a global “DevCast”.
You don’t need Power Query, Dynamic Arrays, or Python to scale Excel. You just need to know Excel.
And yet, most Excel influencers, even respected experts, seem unaware of this. Or worse, they actively deny it. Or try to shoe-horn Modern Excel features into a purpose they weren’t designed for. The implications of this are enormous.
What This Tells Us About the Excel Community
The Reg Call Handler was never just a technical exercise. It was a thought leadership probe into the mindset of the Excel elite.
It asked:
- Do Excel trainers understand real-world business scale?
- Do they know how Excel behaves in multi-user environments?
- Have they ever built client-server solutions in Excel?
- Are their teachings fit for enterprise-grade challenges?
The conclusion: most haven’t, don’t, and aren’t.
Instead, we get tutorials about dynamic arrays, flashy dashboards, and standalone templates. All the while, Excel’s most powerful, robust, scalable architecture—the one that’s been sitting quietly in Office since the 90s—is ignored. Worse still, management are misled into costs that are unnecessary.
Conclusion: One Small Step
The Reg Call Handler is a parable. A simple story about how Excel can scale. But it’s also a challenge to an entire ecosystem of self-described Excel experts to reconsider what they really know.
Because if Excel can scale—and it can—then billions of pounds of software spending, countless failed ERP rollouts, and widespread Excel Hell might be the result not of Excel’s limitations, but of our failure to understand and use it properly.
This isn’t just a technical revelation. It’s a professional reckoning.
Epilogue
If you’ve ever wondered how to turn Excel from a liability into a superpower, start here.
If you’ve been told “Excel can’t scale,” ask: who’s saying that, and why?
And if you’re an Excel expert who said, “this can’t be done”—watch the Reg Call Handler demo.
Then ask the only question that matters: How was it done?
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