By Hiran de Silva
In this article, I want to show how the incorrect use of Excel—or more accurately, a lack of proper understanding of its capabilities—is costing businesses far more than they realise. Not just in capital expenditure and disruption, but in ongoing costs and lost opportunities.
Excel: The Greatest Tool You’re Probably Undervaluing
Excel is the most powerful software tool ever invented for business use. It’s agile, intuitive, affordable, available, and ubiquitous. You can apply it to virtually any business process that involves recording, processing, or communicating data. It’s been around for decades and isn’t going anywhere. Millions of people already know how to use it. So, there’s no shortage of Excel talent out there.
And yet… businesses are spending vast amounts of money and introducing massive disruption simply because they don’t understand what Excel is truly capable of—especially when scaled properly.
Like any tool, Excel can be used optimally or poorly. Think of a motor car. It can be driven in accordance with its design—or it can be misused by someone who doesn’t understand how it works. Excel is no different. Many users never grasp its true design purpose, leading to misuse, inefficiencies, and costly workarounds. Worse still, opportunities are lost because the user never saw them.
Let me walk you through a case study that lays bare this problem.
The Scenario: Can Excel Scale?
In March 2024, I posed a challenge on LinkedIn. The topic? Scalability.
Here was the scenario:
- A call handler processes orders for sportswear using a simple spreadsheet.
- One warehouse stocks and dispatches the goods.
- It’s a small operation. One person. One spreadsheet. Everything works smoothly.
But the business takes off.
- Now there are 20 warehouses.
- And 50 call handlers.
The challenge I posed: How do we scale that spreadsheet to handle the new volume—instantly?
I presented this as a short video story, and almost immediately, high-profile voices in the Excel space chimed in.
The Expert Consensus: “This is Not a Job for Excel”
Paul Barnhurst—widely known in the financial modelling space—was among the first to respond. His conclusion was clear: This is not a job for Excel. You need a purpose-built system.
He wasn’t alone.
Mark Proctor, Christopher T. Fennell, Brian Spiller, and Jan Karel Pieterse—respected experts and influencers in the Excel and FP&A space—all echoed a similar sentiment:
- Trying to scale Excel like this would be detrimental to the business.
- It would be a costly mistake.
- Being doggedly attached to Excel would signal inflexible, narrow thinking.
- If your business is booming, it can afford something better than Excel.
These are not trivial opinions. These are seasoned professionals with decades of experience and large followings. I know many of them personally. Their opinions are made in good faith, based on sound reasoning and real-world experience. I agree with much of what they say.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
The Underlying Belief: Excel Cannot Scale
All of this is underpinned by a very common belief—Excel does not scale.
That belief is built on solid historical evidence. Think about it:
Before electronic spreadsheets, we had pen and paper. The original spreadsheets were A3 analysis pads. You’d write in values by hand, use a calculator to total them, and use a ruler to draw lines and boxes. If you wanted to share it, you’d photocopy and post it. This physical, flat format was limiting. And it certainly didn’t scale.
Electronic spreadsheets like Excel were a huge leap forward. You could now extend rows and columns infinitely. But there were still physical and practical limits. A million rows might be possible, but fill them with formulas and Excel becomes sluggish or crashes. Scrolling across 16,000 columns is impractical. Sending updated files back and forth becomes a spaghetti nightmare of version control and broken links.
All this leads to one conclusion: Excel is fine for small jobs. It breaks down at scale.
That’s the belief. And it’s one that even Excel’s most modern evangelists continue to reinforce.
Modern Excel: A Leap Forward?
Over the last 5–10 years, a new wave of Excel features—branded by some as “Modern Excel”—has emerged. This includes:
- Power Query – to connect, clean, and import data from various sources.
- Dynamic Arrays – to spill multiple values from one formula.
- XLOOKUP – an improvement over VLOOKUP.
- Excel Tables – to refer to ranges as structured objects.
- Lambda Functions – for reusable, logic-rich formulas.
These features are indeed powerful. They address many of the limitations that plague traditional spreadsheet models.
Modern Excel influencers have spent years promoting these tools, rightly arguing that users should move beyond beginner-level Excel. Courses, YouTube videos, blogs, and training programs abound. If you want to avoid Excel Hell, the advice goes, embrace modern Excel.
So when these very same experts—who know modern Excel inside and out—conclude that this challenge cannot be solved with Excel, it’s not because they’re unaware of the tools. It’s precisely because they know them so well.
Which brings us to the punchline…
The Twist: Scaling with Excel Is Simple—If You Know How
In this “REG Call Handler” scenario, we have:
- A spreadsheet that works beautifully at a small scale.
- A business that has grown rapidly.
- Experts claiming that Excel cannot scale to meet the new demand—even with all the modern Excel features.
And yet…
Scaling this with Excel is a simple matter—if you understand how to use Excel properly.
That’s the twist. In Part 2 of this article, I’ll show you how the spreadsheet can be scaled robustly, cleanly, and rapidly—without abandoning Excel, without spending six figures on a new system, and without handing control over to external vendors or rigid IT departments.
You’ll also see just how costly it is to misunderstand Excel.
Because in this case, management was preparing to spend heavily on a new system. But someone—let’s call him Reg—came along and quietly showed them that Excel could scale after all. No capital expenditure. No chaos. No loss of control.
And Reg? He became a hero in the boardroom.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where we reveal how Excel can scale seamlessly when you understand what it was truly designed to do.
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