By Hiran de Silva
Paul Barnhurst recently shared a history of Excel’s milestones over its 40 years. Interesting, yes — but also telling in what it left out. No mention of the Digital Nervous System (DNS), the visionary concept Bill Gates championed in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought. No mention of Excel’s role, through ADO and Office integration, in enabling it.
It’s worth revisiting what was once at the very centre of Microsoft’s vision for productivity — and why it was abandoned.
Excel in Social Media vs Excel in Industry
Today, if you browse LinkedIn or YouTube, you’ll see Excel presented almost exclusively as a data analysis tool. The story is: data lives “somewhere else” (databases, Power BI, CSVs), and Excel is a place to download, manipulate, and send out reports.
That picture is wildly incomplete.
In real industry practice, Excel is far more about data entry, collection, and transmission. Spreadsheets are constantly updated by users, pasted together from other sheets, fed by CSV exports, even re-imported from Power BI or Power Query.
The result is a shadow ecosystem of spreadsheets — a parallel corporate data storage universe. Industry first flagged this around 2000 as a governance crisis: business processes were running not on controlled corporate systems, but on uncontrolled, fragmented Excel files.
The Digital Nervous System Vision
Microsoft’s answer at the time was the Digital Nervous System.
The analogy was simple but brilliant: just as the human nervous system detects changes and triggers responses, a corporate nervous system should detect data changes and trigger processes. A customer order arrives? Systems update, downstream processes fire, managers are notified.
Excel, Access, SQL Server, and ADO were the connective tissue. I was one of many professionals implementing this — with Microsoft’s direct support. They treated us as partners, even inviting us into their ecosystem to evangelise this vision.
The DNS promised automation, triggers, and exception-handling — so managers could focus on decisions, not swivel-chairing between systems.
The Swivel-Chair Problem
But there was a catch.
If crucial business data is scattered across rogue spreadsheets on shared drives and desktops, the DNS cannot “see” it. Instead of automated triggers, processes rely on humans emailing spreadsheets, manually copying values, or rekeying data. This became known as swivel-chair working — literally turning from one screen to another, moving data by hand.
The very existence of this alternative spreadsheet “universe” undermined Microsoft’s nervous system vision.
Enter Social Media
Around the late 2000s, a new force arrived: social media.
The majority of new Excel users weren’t managers thinking about enterprise processes. They were frontline staff working inside their box of responsibility. To them, spreadsheets looked and felt like digital paper. Updating, emailing, and reformatting was the natural order of work.
Social media influencers amplified this mindset. Most of them had never implemented Excel at management level, never grappled with end-to-end enterprise processes, and were often unaware that the DNS vision even existed.
And here’s the irony: Microsoft pivoted.
Instead of courting enterprise professionals, they began courting social media influencers — people whose reach came not from solving real corporate problems, but from producing tutorials optimised for likes, clicks, and followers.
Microsoft’s Strategic Pivot
Faced with two audiences —
- Professionals implementing enterprise-wide DNS solutions, and
- Masses of users (and influencers) treating Excel like digital graph paper —
Microsoft made the obvious marketing choice: follow the numbers.
The DNS message was quietly shelved. Instead, Microsoft doubled down on features for standalone, single-user use cases. Think Power Query, Power BI integrations, “modern Excel” features, and eventually the Power Platform.
These tools demo brilliantly. They fit the influencer narrative. But they run directly against the original DNS philosophy, which was about reducing human swivel-chair work and embedding data into automated, enterprise-wide feedback loops.
Automation vs Re-engineering
This distinction is critical.
- Automation takes a manual process and makes it faster. But the flaws of the manual process remain — often amplified. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times captured this perfectly: when the production line falters because of a bee, chaos multiplies.
- Re-engineering redesigns the process so the manual work is no longer required at all. Think Panama Canal versus sailing round South America.
The DNS vision was about re-engineering. Modern Excel features are mostly about automation.
Power Platform: The New Monster
The Power Platform is the latest incarnation of this pivot. Marketed as no-code/low-code, it appeals to the very audience who dislike programming. But the reality is that beyond simple demos, real-world use cases require complex logic — in other words, code.
That creates a paradox: the very people attracted to it for its simplicity will struggle to use it at scale. IT departments, already wary of VBA because of support issues, may restrict or disable it. The result? Yet another layer of “Excel Hell” in waiting.
The Forgotten Round Wheels
So here we are.
Social media celebrates octagonal and triangular “wheels” — flashy features, influencer-friendly tutorials — while forgetting the round wheels that already exist: Excel as a front-end to relational databases, the hub-and-spoke architecture, the Digital Nervous System.
The DNS hasn’t gone away. In fact, with today’s data volumes and collaboration needs, it is more relevant than ever. The tragedy is that both Microsoft’s marketing and the influencer ecosystem have blinded most users to its existence.
And so Excel Hell persists — not because of Excel’s limitations, but because we’ve forgotten what Excel was truly designed to do.
👉 That’s the real milestone worth remembering at Excel’s 40th birthday. Not another formula or feature. But the abandoned vision of a Digital Nervous System — and the possibility of reviving it today.
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