Below is a list of actual enterprise-level spreadsheet challenges—each drawn from real business contexts. These aren’t puzzles or exercises; they’re operational problems with real financial, managerial, and organizational consequences.
Each one offers a simple question:
Can CoPilot, Power Query, M Code, dynamic arrays, XLOOKUPs, LAMBDA, or any other social-media-endorsed feature actually solve this?
Or more accurately:
What combination of tools—and what architecture—is required to meet the enterprise demand?
These scenarios will be expanded with full case studies and technical walkthroughs. For now, here is the high-level checklist:
✅ The Enterprise-Level Excel Challenge Checklist
- Annual Budgeting Process (Edexcel/WSP Model)
- Multi-department, multi-phase budget compilation across dozens of contributors, version control, audit trail.
- Budget Review Workflow
- Stakeholder-specific summaries, revision tracking, and cross-functional commentary consolidation.
- REG Call Handler Dispatch
- Real-time access to 20 warehouse spreadsheets for inventory allocation, dependent dropdowns, call handling automation.
- VOLMAN (Volunteer Management System)
- Roster management, shifts, availability across locations—requires full scheduling and two-way coordination.
- Friends’ Shared Expenses (Christmas Scenario)
- Peer-to-peer reconciliation, proportional contributions, automation of ledger balancing.
- Excel Tables – The Motorcar Fallacy
- Based on Myles Arnott’s “Tables” showcase—reinterpreted to demonstrate structural limitations in modern table-based design when scaled.
- Donald Trump’s Birthday Guest List
- Permissions, filtering logic, RSVP coordination—business rules enforced over shared lists.
- Eurovision Scoreboard Simulation
- Real-time, multi-voter scoring from multiple regions with concurrency and auditability.
- Full-Year Forecast Modelling
- Rolling forecasts, automated actual-vs-plan updates, driver-based models, cross-region inputs.
- Gordon Ramsay’s Restaurant Experiment
- Fast-response, real-time data flow from multiple kitchens (stores), dispatch and update reconciliation.
- Michael Jr. Workflow Transformation
- Inherited Excel system—refactored and re-architected for clarity, automation, and control.
- Nelson Mwangi’s First Project
- An onboarding case for a junior analyst tasked with fixing broken departmental reports—introducing scalable systems.
- Oz du Soleil & Wyn Hopkins’ Expert Challenge
- Monthly “Employee of the Week” tracker with complex business rules, logic automation, and real-time recognition flows.
- Bill Jelen 2316
- Departmental cost center reconciliation—highlighting gaps and mismatches, reconciliation flags, and exceptions handling.
- Mark Proctor Reconciliation Problem
- Finance-led accounting problem—tracking disconnected GL entries to re-align statements across teams.
- Mynda Treacy’s Visualization Showpiece (10M+ views)
- Pretty dashboards—but here assessed against real enterprise needs: source integrity, refresh control, and traceability.
- Caston’s Roof Planks Survey Workflow
- Materials dispatch and inventory control in construction project management.
- Hilson Moran Specification Document
- Resource scheduling, availability matrix, prioritization of workloads across shifts.
- Kat Norton’s Operational Checklist Tracker
- Coordinated task tracking, dependent deadlines, stakeholder sign-off, escalation rules.
- Sunday Volunteers Assignment
- Rotating rosters, priority allocation, absence tracking, and constraints-based optimization.
- WSP Budget Process Transformation Model
- High-impact Excel-to-database redesign enabling enterprise-wide collaboration, logging, and validation.
Two Questions for Every Entry
For each scenario above, we invite the reader and Excel professionals to ask:
- How would you solve it using the tools you’ve learned from YouTube or LinkedIn Learning?
- Would your solution be scalable, efficient, and maintainable in an enterprise setting? Or would it break the moment it grew?
Why This Matters
These are not academic exercises. If you are hired into an enterprise environment—as a temp, contractor, analyst, or even FP&A lead—these are the types of systems you will either operate or be expected to build. Whether you’re a creator or an end-user, your mindset determines whether your work will collapse under scale or quietly power an entire division.
Most social media training promotes Excel as a single-user sandbox. But real work happens inside enterprise processes, across people, departments, and countries.
And if you’re working inside Excel—you are inside an enterprise system. Whether you know it or not.
What’s Next?
This checklist will be updated with:
- Case study links
- Walkthroughs
- Architecture diagrams
- Commentary on tool suitability: VBA? ADO? Access? Power Query? SQL Server? CoPilot?
Ultimately, this series is about raising the standard and asking a simple but overdue question:
“Is the Excel training we’re receiving remotely fit for the jobs we’re being hired to do?”
Let’s find out.
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