The Hole Is in the Wrong Place: What Power Query Teaches Us About Excel Education

By Hiran de Silva

Theodore Levitt, the marketing guru, famously reminded us that customers don’t want a quarter-inch drill bit — they want a quarter-inch hole. More precisely, they want the hole where they want it.

I was reminded of this recently when I posed a genuine question on LinkedIn: could Power Query consolidate 400 budget templates across multiple levels of a group structure?

I received no shortage of eager volunteers. After all, there are tens of thousands of tutorials online (and several thousand YouTube videos) promising exactly this: “How to consolidate with Power Query.”

And yes, technically, you can.

But here’s the problem: the hole wasn’t drilled where the customer actually needs it.

Two Deal-Breakers

Anyone who has lived through a group budgeting cycle with hundreds of operating units will know these truths from experience:

1. The process must be live. Budgeting isn’t a one-off batch exercise. It’s a rolling collaboration over two to three weeks, with multiple levels of management iterating and adjusting the model. Relegating this to a batch process makes the whole exercise unworkable.
2. The output must be a report. Senior management will not accept raw tables spat out of Power Query. Sending operating managers a table instead of a properly formatted budget report is, at best, tone-deaf and at worst, insulting.

Both of these are non-negotiables in real organisations. Yet the consolidation answers offered with Power Query happily sidestepped them.

The Taxi That Stops a Mile Short

It’s like calling a taxi to take you home, only to be dropped off a mile away because that happens to be where the driver lives.

Technically, you got “a ride.” But did you actually get what you needed?

You’d be right to ask: is this a taxi service — or just a passing hitchhiker who happened to be heading your way?

And why didn’t he tell you before you got in?

The Literal vs. The Real

Here lies the bigger problem. The Excel community has been conditioned to celebrate the literal — what can be shown on screen in a quick demo.

Power Query, with its neat transformations and tidy interfaces, is perfectly suited for this culture. It produces flashy before-and-after results that make for excellent tutorial material.

But designing an enterprise budgeting process is not about “look what I can do on screen.” It’s about understanding why the process exists, what the immovable constraints are, and how to meet them.

That requires experience. It requires empathy with how organisations actually work. And it requires asking the deeper “why” — not just the superficial “how.”

Conditioning a False Reality

This is why the sheer abundance of Power Query tutorials is so misleading. They reinforce the illusion that these literal demonstrations are what businesses really need.

The result? A whole generation of learners conditioned into a false understanding of the real world: that the goal is to create clever screen transformations, rather than to deliver workable enterprise processes.

And so we end up with drill bits that make holes — just not in the right place.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to budgeting (or any enterprise process), the non-negotiables matter more than the demo.

A batch process isn’t good enough. A raw table isn’t good enough. A taxi that stops a mile short isn’t good enough.

Until we start asking “why” — why this process exists, why managers insist on certain formats, why live models are critical — we’ll keep celebrating the wrong solutions.

The danger is clear: an Excel community conditioned to value what looks powerful, rather than what is powerful in the real world.

Levitt’s warning echoes louder than ever: customers don’t want a drill bit. They want the hole — and they want it in the right place.