The Spreadsheet vs Database Debate Has Been Weaponised – And Here’s How to End It in One Move

By Hiran de Silva

For years, the conversation about spreadsheets and databases has been poisoned. It’s not just a technical misunderstanding anymore – it’s political. It’s weaponised.

Two entrenched camps shout past each other:

• IT says: “Excel is not a database. You amateurs are causing Excel Hell.”
• Some managers say: “We can’t use Access – IT won’t let us. It’s a developer tool. Off-limits.”
• IT again says: “If we let users create databases, the place will be littered with them and we’ll lose control.”
• Some business users say: “We’ve tried moving to Access before – we couldn’t get modifications done quickly, so we went back to Excel.”
• Mark Proctor says: “Citizen developers can’t spin up a database in 15 minutes. IT will take a year to deliver one.”
• Jordan Goldmeier says: “There’s nothing you can do with Access that you can’t do better in Excel.”

Every single one of those statements is wrong. And not just “a bit wrong” – fundamentally wrong, because they’re all built on the same false premise: that spreadsheet and database are either/or.

They are not. The real power comes from combining them.
And the fact this simple truth has been buried under years of noise, politics, and self-interest is the real reason so many organisations are stuck in spreadsheet chaos.

The Calm, Bullet-Proof Demonstration

Here’s how you obliterate every “Excel can’t scale” claim in one live demo:

Scenario:
400 operating units, 4 levels of roll-up (shop → city → country → region), global group budget consolidation. Traditionally done with thousands – sometimes millions – of fragile external links.

Old way:
Link all 400 files into a master workbook. One broken link? The whole model collapses. Version control is a nightmare. Every “final” file spawns a “final-final” and a “really-final”.

New way (my way):

1. In Excel, point to a shared folder on the corporate network.
2. Click a button – Excel creates an empty Access database in that folder.
   • No Access license required.
   • No IT request ticket.
   • Creation time: 2 seconds.
3. Click another button – Excel creates a budget table schema in the database.
4. Every budget holder has the same Excel template with a “PUT” button. When they click it, their numbers are uploaded into the central table.
5. Total rows uploaded: ~11,200.
6. Consolidation is now just a query:
   • Select “India” → instant national consolidation.
   • Select “Asia” → instant regional consolidation.
   • Select “All” → instant global consolidation.

No links. No file-passing. No batch refresh. Live and collaborative.

Drill-down? Click a number and see the exact shop-level breakdown in a fraction of a second. Updated budgets appear live without anyone “sending the latest version” to anyone.

Why This Wins Every Time

Once you’ve seen that demo, every anti-Excel talking point collapses:

• “Excel is not a database” (IT) – True, it isn’t. But Excel has been able to work with a relational database natively since the mid-1990s. You just saw it.
• “We can’t use Access – it’s for developers” (manager) – False. This isn’t using Access as a development environment. It’s using the Access database engine, built into Office, to store structured data.
• “IT won’t let us create databases” – You don’t need them to. The database is created by Excel, in seconds, under governance rules you control.
• “It’s hard to find skilled people to maintain an Access solution” – This isn’t “moving to Access”. It’s keeping your process in Excel, with the database simply storing and serving the data.
• “Users can’t spin up a database in 15 minutes” (Mark Proctor) – We just did it in two seconds.
• “If you ask IT for a database, it’ll take a year” – Not anymore.
• “Nothing you can do with Access you can’t do better in Excel” (Jordan Goldmeier) – Show me the pure-Excel equivalent of this live, link-free, drillable, instant global consolidation. Ball’s in your court.

Why This Debate Is Still Alive

The reason we’re still hearing “spreadsheet vs database” in 2025 is because the conversation has been hijacked by people with an interest in keeping it alive:

• IT departments justifying central control by portraying business users as dangerous.
• ERP/FP&A vendors justifying multi-million-pound projects by claiming Excel “can’t scale”.
• Influencers who have never built an enterprise-grade model and don’t know what Excel can do when paired with a database.

This politicisation keeps business users ignorant of the single change that transforms Excel from fragile to enterprise-grade: separating the data from the spreadsheet.

One Final Nail in the Coffin

Take the “Nine Circles of Excel Hell” white paper that’s been circulating for a decade. Its entire argument collapses the moment you acknowledge that Excel can have a relational database backend – something it’s been able to do for 30 years.

The truth is, Excel can scale. It can consolidate. It can run live, collaborative processes without fragile links or manual batching. And you don’t need IT, a procurement cycle, or a £3 million budget to make it happen.

If you’ve been told otherwise, you’ve been on the receiving end of weaponised misinformation.
The way out is not to pick a side in the spreadsheet vs database war – it’s to use both, properly, together.