By Hiran de Silva
This year Excel turns 40. Four decades on, it’s time to reflect on the outcome of one of the most powerful business tools ever invented.
- First, Excel has inadvertently spawned a highly lucrative industry—the “Alternatives to Excel” industry. The very existence of billion-dollar FP&A, BI, and ERP tools rests on the narrative that Excel is broken.
- Second, Excel has given rise to a noisy ecosystem of influencers and followers, many of whom misunderstand Excel’s real architecture and teach surface-level tricks instead of enterprise-level solutions.
- Third, and most importantly, the greatest opportunity in Excel history—the one that solves Excel Hell itself—remains almost completely unknown.
This is the gap I am working to expose and evangelize. Through my Mission Impossible series and my concept of the Digital Librarian, I show that Excel Hell does not have to exist.
If Excel is understood properly, Excel Hell disappears. And when that happens, the “alternatives” industry is revealed for what it is: a workaround for a problem that Excel itself can already solve.
That is the biggest opportunity in Excel’s 40-year history. And I believe I’m the only one demonstrating it in practice.
My track record is the hook. My demonstrations prove the point. My mission is to teach the principles, mentor others, and evangelize the true power of Excel—the forgotten round wheel in a world of square ones.
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