By Hiran de Silva
Jordan Goldmeier once asserted there’s nothing you can do in Access that you can’t do better in Excel. It’s a bold claim—and a category error. It’s like saying, “There’s nothing you can do with a cruise ship that an airliner can’t do better.”
Excel and Access are two different paradigms. They serve different purposes. But—like taking a flight from Seattle to Miami before boarding a Caribbean cruise—they become far more powerful when used together. That’s synergy. Excel for interface and presentation; Access (or any relational database) for structure, logic, and integrity.
Microsoft themselves designed it this way. That was the whole point of bundling Excel and Access into Office Professional. It was to empower the user to bypass the red tape—build enterprise-grade solutions without waiting on IT.
So no—it’s not either/or. It’s both, in tandem. The synergy isn’t just better. It’s transformational.
Mark Proctor: 45 Clicks and the Long Way Around
Then there’s Mark Proctor’s reconciliation demo. In it, he shows how to reconcile two lists in Power Query. After about 45 clicks (yes, I counted), he arrives at a working result—albeit a local, cosmetic, micro-automation.
Now, “automate” is a generous term here. What he shows is how to step through a wizard. Useful? Sure. Scalable? Not really. And definitely not what a seasoned controller, reconciling hundreds of accounts nightly, would call efficient.
So I built a solution. One that reconciles not two lists, but any two from a set of fifty, with just a couple of clicks—or even unattended in the background. It uses a relational database (Access), linked to Excel. You can choose your sources, run the logic, and see the results instantly.
When I showed it to Mark, he appreciated the power. But then came the refrain: “That uses a database. That’s not accessible to the ordinary Excel user.”
Ah. There it is.
But… why not?
The IT Bottleneck Fiction
Mark’s well-known PDF features a conversation between an Excel user and an IT guy. It goes like this:
- Excel user: I need a database.
- IT guy: Wait six to twelve months.
- Excel user: I need it now.
- IT guy: Well then… do it in Excel.
It’s meant to be an illustration of how IT bottlenecks force users into kludges. But here’s the irony: the user already has Access. Microsoft gave it to them. It installs right alongside Excel. Just go File > New > Access Database.
No board meeting. No change management process. No secret handshake.
Creating a database table in Access is no harder than creating one in Excel. And integrating that database with Excel—using ADO, which Microsoft released in 1996—is also straightforward. No special permission. No SQL administrator required. No extension to the building.
So when Mark talks about governance layers, risk reviews, and “citizen developer limitations”—it sounds like he simply didn’t get the memo either.
Annette de Young: “But What Happens When You Leave?”
Annette’s response to one of my demos was: “What happens when you leave?”
Let’s be honest: this is a tired scare tactic. It implies that solutions which actually work are somehow dangerous if they’re not supported by a vendor contract or change control team. But the budgeting model I presented—which includes consolidation, drill-downs, and dynamic mapping—can be easily adjusted by anyone who understands basic query logic.
Take the drill-down feature. One query, slightly adjusted by adding Region and a GROUP BY clause. That’s it. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even VBA. It’s a basic extension of a basic idea—because the model is built sensibly.
What happens when I leave? Nothing. Because anyone competent can pick it up.
Which brings us to…
Jason Khoo: Power Query Can Do It (Can It?)
Jason Khoo insists that Power Query can do the same drill-downs and dynamic mapping I’ve demonstrated. I invited him—politely—to show us how.
The offer stands.
Because if you’re going to claim equivalency, show it. Not a feature list, not marketing slides. Show a working demo. Otherwise, we risk creating illusions of capability that fall apart under real-world pressure.
And that’s a theme here. Too many Excel influencers are creating illusions of simplicity or illusions of limitation. Either something is made to seem harder than it is—or more powerful than it actually is—depending on what they’re selling.
A Memo From 1993 (Signed, Satya Nadella)
Back in December 1993, Microsoft held a DevCast that demonstrated Excel 5 pulling data from a corporate database. It was a live telecast. Satya Nadella himself did the demo. He had hair then. The point? Microsoft was showing the world that Excel and databases could already work together.
And in 1996, they released ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) to make that connectivity seamless. It’s still the easiest way today to integrate Excel with Access or SQL Server, even on the cloud!
So when someone says, “This can’t be done,” or “Not by regular users,” or “It’s too complex,” what they really mean is, “I never learned this. And I don’t teach it.”
Which is fine. But it doesn’t make it untrue.
Final Thoughts (And a Smile)
To recap:
- Jordan, it’s not Access vs Excel. It’s Excel with Access. Think cruise ships and airliners.
- Mark, automation isn’t defined by clicking 45 times in Power Query.
- Annette, if a solution breaks when someone leaves, it wasn’t a good solution to begin with.
- Jason, let’s see your drill-down. With Power Query. At scale.
And to all of them: the memo wasn’t hidden. It came bundled with Microsoft Office—30 years ago.
Microsoft built these tools to empower users. Not to lock them out. Not to force dependency. But to give them everything they need—spreadsheet, database, word processor, and presentation tool—plus the glue to combine them.
It’s not rocket science. It’s productivity. And it’s long overdue for a comeback.
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