By Hiran de Silva
Over the last two decades, a quiet transformation has reshaped Excel—and not necessarily for the better. Microsoft, once the champion of end-user empowerment, appears to be subtly shifting its priorities. Excel, the tool that once powered some of the most efficient business process solutions on the desktop, is being remodeled to appeal to a new user base—one that’s larger, louder, and more likely to post on social media, but far less concerned with enterprise-scale design or operational complexity.
Let’s unpack this.
The Demographic Shift
The massive explosion of personal computing, especially laptops, has democratized access to Excel. That in itself is a good thing. But with this demographic landslide comes a predictable corporate response: marketing teams at Microsoft are now optimizing the product for casual users, not professionals managing complex business operations.
Where once Excel was the toolkit of finance departments, operations analysts, and business architects, it is now increasingly curated for influencers, beginners, and “local box” thinkers—those solving isolated tasks rather than architecting integrated systems.
Subtle Rewiring: From VBA to Office Scripts
A telling example of this shift comes from a small but significant change: the Automate tab. Once upon a time, recording a macro or writing VBA code was front-and-center for those seeking automation. Now, VBA has been quietly relegated. By default, new Excel installations highlight Office Scripts—Microsoft’s JavaScript-based scripting language for Excel Online—often confusing even experienced users who suddenly can’t find their VBA editor.
But the issue isn’t just visibility. It’s architecture.
Office Scripts is a cloud-native scripting framework designed for a SaaS environment. VBA, on the other hand, is a COM-based language built to control Excel as a desktop application. The two aren’t interchangeable. Yet influencers—and Microsoft itself—conflate them in demos and documentation, suggesting one is merely a modern upgrade to the other. That’s misleading. The analogy here is apt: a horse-drawn carriage and an early motorcar may look similar, but what powers them is fundamentally different.
The Macro Panic and Its Misinterpretation
Another piece of this slow detachment from power-user capability came with Microsoft’s legitimate effort to manage macro security. Users now encounter blocked macros by default on downloaded files, with new Trust Center settings requiring manual override at the folder level. That’s fair and prudent—after all, VBA can be misused.
But social media, lacking nuance, twisted this into a meme: “Macros are dangerous, macros are banned, Microsoft doesn’t want you using them.” And so a generation of users, without ever learning what VBA is for, abandon it completely—just as a newer, noisier generation is being sold prettier but shallower tools that often create more chaos in the enterprise, not less.
From Empowerment to Entertainment
This matters. Microsoft’s rise to dominance was built on empowering end users—especially those in business roles—to build what they needed, without waiting for IT. Tools like VBA and Access were never hacks; they were part of the official Microsoft ecosystem, enabling highly productive, scalable, enterprise-grade solutions when used by knowledgeable professionals.
But today’s ecosystem is different. Social media influencers who lack real-world deployment experience now dominate the conversation. Many treat Excel as a toy, not a tool. Their focus is on “likes,” not longevity. A flashy formula or a Power Query trick looks great on a screen recording but doesn’t scale across a multinational budget process. It’s entertainment disguised as expertise.
The Shadowing of the Round Wheel
Microsoft’s current marketing strategy now promotes these shallow features—Power Query, Dynamic Arrays, Office Scripts—to a growing audience that doesn’t know or care that the “round wheel” of Excel already exists. Meanwhile, those who do know—those who’ve implemented hub-and-spoke architecture using Access and ADO with Excel—find their methods increasingly relegated to obscurity.
But round wheels always win.
Hub-and-spoke design, driven from Excel on the desktop using a relational database like Access or SQL Server, remains one of the most agile, robust, and scalable process architectures available today. You don’t need to abandon Excel—you just need to connect it.
The spokes in this model can be anything: Excel Online, Google Sheets, Power Apps, mobile dashboards. The hub stays solid. The process becomes scalable. And management sees results without vendor lock-in or massive capital outlay.
The Illusion of Progress, The Rise of Clunky Spreadsheets
What Microsoft promotes as empowerment for the many is often a dumbing down of what Excel once was—and still can be. By focusing on local solutions, Microsoft inadvertently fuels the very problem that FP&A tools and ERP vendors exploit: Excel Hell.
They point to the mess created by naïve usage of Excel and say, “Look, Excel doesn’t work—you need our tool.” And so begins the cycle of wasted spending, failed implementations, and disappointed CFOs.
Meanwhile, those trained in proper architecture—those who can build a reconciled, auditable, database-integrated model in Excel—have the opportunity to be the only game in town.
The Opportunity Behind the Noise
The very trend that threatens to bury enterprise Excel also reveals an enormous opening. With the current generation being nudged toward complexity, cloud lock-in, and clunky sheet-based workflows, clarity, simplicity, and power are more valuable than ever.
We can demonstrate that Excel on the desktop, properly harnessed with VBA and a relational backend, reduces complexity while increasing agility and trust. In contrast to influencer-driven chaos, this approach offers transparency, auditability, and true digital transformation—on a budget.
Final Thoughts
Yes, Excel is being dumbed down for the masses. Yes, Microsoft is nudging users toward solutions that generate more Excel Hell than they solve. But for those who understand Excel’s true capabilities—who know how to implement a client-server, hub-and-spoke solution using tools that have existed since the 1990s—this is a golden era of opportunity.
Because when complexity rises and productivity falls, decision-makers start looking for alternatives.
And when they do, we’ll be ready—with a round wheel in hand.
Let the influencers chase features. Let the vendors push chaos-as-a-service. Meanwhile, we’ll deliver scalable, efficient, and elegant enterprise solutions using the Excel platform everyone already owns—but barely understands.
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