By Hiran de Silva
Most Excel training and consulting is focused on showing off the drill.
But the business needs a hole. In a specific place. For a specific reason.
Thanks to Professor Janek Ratnatunga (CMA Australia) who introduced me to Theodore Levitt’s insight:
“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
🎯 In business, that hole might be:
• A live budgeting process
• A familiar report layout
• A collaborative real-time workflow
• A cascading dropdown that works across 50 files
But what do we get instead?
👉 A flashy drill demo—Power Query, Pivot Tables, DAX, etc.—drilling holes where it wants to, not where the customer needs them.
I had this literally happen when I hired a builder to fix a leaky conservatory roof. He strengthened the structure… but left the actual gap open. Job “done”—but puddles still forming.
And in Excel?
I’ve seen budgeting models lose their live workflow just to eliminate external links.
Dropdown techniques that break when applied to enterprise-scale processes.
And “solutions” that forget entirely what the customer actually values.
🙄 Worst of all? When you point this out, the reply is:
“But look how good the drill is!”
💡 Real transformation starts by asking:
“Where does the customer need the hole—and why?”
Everything else follows from that.
💬 Have you ever seen a brilliant technical solution that completely missed the point?
This rant is triggered by yet another example of the common practice of consolidating a multi-level global budgeting process with Excel’s Power Query. Yes, it’s great we no longer have millions of flimsy external links, but wait – what? We’ve relegated the live process to a batch process, and we’re now sending out Pivot Tables?????
Watch the video.
#Excel #DigitalTransformation #EnterpriseSolutions #CustomerFirst #SpreadsheetArchitecture #LinkedInVoices #FPandA #ProcessDesign #ExcelHell #DatabaseIntegration #BusinessTransformation
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