Imagine this: You’re driving through unfamiliar countryside, trusting the road signs to guide your journey. You spot a signpost pointing boldly toward “Enterprise Success – 10 miles.” Confident, you follow it. Forty minutes later, you arrive not at success but at a swamp of confusion and delay. Was the road sign broken? No. It was pristine. It was authoritative. It simply pointed in the wrong direction.
Welcome to the modern state of Excel education.
Let’s be clear: the road sign isn’t the problem. It was installed with care, painted in bright colours, perhaps even designed by a committee and unveiled with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The problem lies in the direction. That is, the underlying assumptions, models, and incentives that determine where we point people who are seeking better skills, greater productivity, or a ticket out of Excel Hell.
And oh, what a hell it has become.
The Misguided Signposts of “Modern Excel”
Over the past decade, the Excel world has been festooned with a dazzling array of new signposts. Power Query! Dynamic Arrays! Lambda! XLOOKUP! Shiny, clickable, short-form content has emerged around each like roadside attractions—”See the Amazing Spill Function!”, “Come for the Pivot, Stay for the Slicer!”
These are not bad features. Far from it. They are signposts with their own utility, in the right context. But here’s the rub: they are being sold as the destination—as the golden road out of chaos and into productivity.
They are not.
They are tools, not solutions. They are syntax, not strategy. And they do not, despite the marketing, address the core pain that afflicts enterprise spreadsheet use: fragmentation, duplication, fragility, and the utter lack of scalable architecture.
A Sign of the Times
So, who put up the sign pointing in the wrong direction?
Not villains, necessarily. Just people with good intentions, limited incentives, and a poor view of the broader landscape. Social media rewards what’s shiny and fast. Training courses need to simplify to sell. Product marketers need to prove that something—anything—is new and worth the upgrade.
But what gets lost is the compass. The strategic compass that asks:
- What problem are we solving?
- What’s the business context?
- How does this scale?
- Who owns the data, and where does it live?
If you don’t ask these questions, the road sign may still look impressive, but it will lead you to the same pit you’ve been stuck in since Excel 2003—only with more colorful formula bars.
Recalibrating the Compass
The true solution is not a better road sign. It is a better sense of direction. That requires principle-led thinking. Architectural thinking. It means seeing Excel not as a toy box of functions, but as a gateway to enterprise-scale processes.
The destination is not a clever VLOOKUP or a cascading dropdown. The destination is a robust system where:
- Data flows cleanly from source to reporting.
- Users enter information once—in the right place.
- Consolidation is automatic, real-time, and invisible.
- Errors are caught early and fixed upstream.
- And yes—people get promoted for delivering real, measurable value.
None of that comes from better syntax. It comes from better system design.
Conclusion: Don’t Blame the Signpost—Fix the Map
So next time you see a viral Excel tip promising to change your life, pause for a moment. Ask yourself: is this really a new direction? Or just a shiny new sign pointing deeper into the same mess?
Because if you’re sitting in a swamp with 20 tabs open and 300 linked workbooks, it’s not that you didn’t follow instructions. It’s that the instructions were pointing the wrong way.
And the fault, dear reader, lies not in the road sign—but in the direction it points.
P.S. If you’re ready to fix the map, not just repaint the signs, you’re not alone. There’s a movement growing—quietly, strategically—of Excel professionals who are building systems that scale. And the journey begins not with a tip, but with a question: Where are we really trying to go?
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