By Hiran de Silva
In a world where spreadsheets underpin the operations of nearly every industry—from finance and logistics to healthcare and education—it’s extraordinary how little transparency there is around the tools we use, the methods we’re taught, and the products we’re sold.
Recently, I ran a series of LinkedIn polls with a simple goal: to uncover the depth of cognitive dissonance in the community when it comes to the foundational tools of enterprise productivity—especially Excel.
The first poll asked: Has Excel become more productive in the enterprise over the last decade, with the advent of modern features like Power Query, Dynamic Arrays, Lambda, XLOOKUP, Python, and Copilot?
An overwhelming majority—six to one—said yes.
Fair enough.
But then came the second poll: I presented a simple, observable fact—the alternative-to-Excel industry is exploding. Over 150 startups now offer tools that claim to “replace Excel” in enterprise use. Many of them openly promote their product with a central pitch: escape Excel Hell.
So I asked the obvious follow-up: How do we reconcile these two realities?
If Excel is now more productive than ever, why is there an entire booming industry trying to eliminate it?
The response was deafening in its silence.
Only three people answered, all with satirical responses. One said, “It’s cognitive dissonance.” Another called the entire alternative-to-Excel market a “hoax.” A third doubted the productivity gains from Excel itself.
What this reveals is not just confusion—it reveals a lack of intellectual transparency in the public discourse around Excel and enterprise tools.
And this is no trivial matter.
Billions Are at Stake
Enterprise software is big business. We’re not talking about weekend hobbyist spreadsheets. We’re talking about multi-billion-dollar decisions in system procurement, process design, productivity tools, and long-term infrastructure.
So when a particular methodology or product is promoted as a silver bullet—whether it’s Power Query, Airtable, Smartsheet, Anaplan, or even “modern Excel”—we need to ask: where’s the evidence?
What’s the cost?
How long does it take to implement?
How much control does the company lose?
What happens when the business process needs to change next year?
The Misinformation Fog
Much of the Excel-related content on social media today is not education. It’s marketing disguised as education.
It’s a subtle sales pitch—often from influencers affiliated with vendors, trainers pushing course material, or MVPs incentivized by Microsoft’s ecosystem. They showcase flashy features and clever tricks, often designed for standalone or cosmetic use cases, but rarely tested against the demands of enterprise process design: things like consolidation, audit trails, multi-user input, reconciliation, reporting automation, and long-term maintainability.
Meanwhile, many in the alternative-to-Excel camp demonize Excel based on straw-man arguments. They point to chaotic spreadsheets created by amateurs and declare, “See? Excel can’t scale.” Then they offer an expensive, rigid, cloud-based alternative that locks you into their platform.
The tragedy?
None of these viewpoints represent Excel in the hands of professionals.
A Simple Proposal: Test It. Publicly.
If we really want clarity, the solution is simple:
Take a common enterprise use case—like a multi-department budgeting system, collaborative forecasting, or global seat booking.
Then:
- Let Excel practitioners (especially those using professional-grade architecture: VBA, ADO, relational backends, automation) show how they would solve it.
- Let modern Excel promoters present their approach—tables, Power Query, dynamic arrays, etc.
- Let alternative tool vendors show how their system would tackle it—cost, timeline, constraints and all.
Compare them transparently on:
- Agility
- Accessibility
- Affordability
- Applicability
- Auditability
- User autonomy
This is not about one-upping each other. This is about getting to the truth of what works—and for whom.
Introducing: Excel Mission Impossible
To kick off this transparency movement, I’ve launched a series called Excel Mission Impossible. In each episode, we take a real enterprise scenario and issue a challenge:
“Here is a practical need seen in every business.
Here are the constraints.
Show us how your method handles it—efficiently, scalably, and responsibly.”
Everyone is invited. No one is excluded. But there is one condition: show your working. No vague marketing slides. No animations. No cherry-picked demos. Just real thought processes, real architectures, and real implications.
Let the community see for itself.
We Owe It to the Industry
This is not an academic debate. Businesses are burning capital on tools that underdeliver, replacing systems that could have been transformed, not abandoned. The opportunity cost is immense.
Excel is not perfect. But neither is anything else. The real scandal is that we haven’t held these methods and products up to common standards of transparency and scrutiny.
Let’s change that.
Let’s clear the mist.
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