By Hiran de Silva
If you’ve followed my origin story, you might already be asking yourself a simple question.
That penny-drop moment I experienced all those years ago—where I saw how spreadsheets could be transformed from limited, fragile tools into scalable, enterprise-grade systems—was powerful enough to triple my pay in four different companies.
But here’s the kicker: the opportunity I seized then is far greater today than it ever was. And my prediction is that it will grow even greater still in the future. Let me explain how this plays out, and then I’ll give you an example.
The Industry That Grew on the Claim “You Can’t Do That with Excel”
For more than 20 years, an industry has grown and flourished, now worth well over $100 billion. Its origins are rooted in a simple pattern: presenters would demonstrate their planning or budgeting software, and each time they did something flashy, they’d declare:
“You can’t do that with Excel.”
I first came across this in 1998. At the time, I was working as a consultant for Edexcel, earning well and hungry for new ideas. I would often attend IT industry seminars at my own expense—Bill Gates’ vision of the digital nervous system fascinated me. It was about automating business triggers, just like the human nervous system.
So I took a day off unpaid and attended the Softworld exhibition in London, eager to see a company called Adaytum. They were showcasing improvements on Excel, and I wanted to see how I could push my capabilities even further.
The presenter, an actor (as I later discovered), kept repeating the mantra: “You can’t do this with Excel.” Every five minutes—new demo, same phrase. By the end, the audience was beaming. I was deeply disturbed. Why? Because everything he claimed Excel couldn’t do, I was already doing—professionally, at enterprise level, with Excel.
Afterwards, when I confronted him, he confessed he was just an actor reading a script. The real people behind the product weren’t on stage. That was my first exposure to what would become a widespread business model: build software, present it, and win the audience by claiming Excel can’t do it.
Five years later, Cognos (who had bought Adaytum for about $185 million) repeated the same play. At their seminar, the presenter wowed the audience with a flourish that was nothing more than a pivot table trick—something Excel had been able to do for years. The presenter didn’t even know it was a pivot table.
Then IBM bought Cognos for several hundred million. The script continued: you can’t do this with Excel.
And so it went. By 2012, Adaptive Insights had released their infamous white paper: The Nine Circles of Excel Hell. It played on Dante’s Inferno, listing nine reasons why Excel was “limited”: lack of consolidation, poor collaboration, no audit trail, accidental deletions, fragile links, and so on.
I attended one of their reseller seminars in London. Same script. Same pattern. This time, I challenged the presenter directly. I explained that those so-called limitations only applied to spreadsheets built by novices. Enterprise-class spreadsheets, designed with proper architecture, avoided all of those issues.
The boss admitted something astonishing. He said:
“Excel may be incredibly powerful. But they don’t know that.”
And he pointed at the audience.
That was the revelation. The entire business model of Adaptive (and later called Workday Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, and over 150 others) was built on a flawed comparison. They weren’t competing against Excel as it can be used—they were competing against Excel as it is most often misused.
A Flawed Comparison: Novice Spreadsheets vs. Enterprise Architecture
Here’s the truth.
The “anti-Excel” industry makes billions by comparing their client-server cloud systems with the worst practice of Excel: standalone, siloed spreadsheets stuffed with fragile links and duplicated data.
That’s like comparing a modern jet airliner to a bicycle and concluding that bicycles can’t fly. True, but irrelevant.
What they never tell you is that Excel itself has always been capable of client-server architecture. What I call the hub-and-spoke model, or more recently, the Digital Librarian. Data can be centralized. Spreadsheets can connect to that data, both retrieving (“GET”) and submitting (“PUT”). Once you implement that architecture, the so-called “Excel Hell” vanishes.
And here’s the kicker: in that architecture, Excel doesn’t just compete—it wins.
Why? Because Excel is:
- Agile – You can adapt it quickly without waiting months for IT.
- Affordable – You already own it. The license is paid.
- Accessible – Everyone already has it.
- Ubiquitous – As common on corporate PCs as the browser.
No vendor lock-in. No $10m budgets. No three-year IT projects.
The Irony of “Export to Excel”
There’s a running joke in the industry: the most common button in every alternative product is “Export to Excel.”
Think about that. If these systems are truly alternatives to Excel, why is their main feature to spit the data back into Excel? The answer is simple.
Because Excel is still needed:
- To prepare the data before uploading.
- To process the outputs into the exact shapes businesses require.
In other words, the “alternatives” depend on Excel to work. That’s not an alternative—that’s parasitism.
Why Modern Excel Training Misses the Point
Unfortunately, the situation is made worse by how Excel is taught today.
Most of what gets branded “Modern Excel” (Power Query, Power Pivot, XLOOKUP, LAMBDA) is designed for single-user workbooks. They are brilliant tools for analysts working on their own machine. But they do not scale to enterprise-wide processes.
Why? Because the data model is still inside the workbook. It’s siloed. It adds to Excel Hell, not cures it.
This is why I say: these tools are powerful, but they are not the answer to the $100B industry that demonises Excel. They don’t move the dial.
What does?
Architecting Excel in client-server mode. Separating the data from the spreadsheet. Building a hub-and-spoke model. Making Excel the intelligent client to a centralized Digital Librarian.
That’s how you dismantle the false narrative.
The Real Opportunity Today
Let’s take stock.
- Excel is massively loved and relied upon.
- It is also massively misused.
- That misuse creates Excel Hell.
- The IT industry exploits this by selling “alternatives.”
- Their entire pitch is based on a flawed comparison.
- Excel, when architected correctly, beats them hands-down.
That means the opportunity today is enormous. Far bigger than in 1998.
Why? Because now the contrast is clearer. Now the anti-Excel chorus is louder. Now the $100B market exists. And yet, the solution is already on every desktop in the world—for $12 a month.
The opportunity for those who understand this is simple:
- For professionals – Be the change agent who transforms Excel Hell into enterprise-grade, cloud-leveraged systems. You will create immense value and be rewarded accordingly.
- For managers – Sponsor these transformations. You’ll get the agility and efficiency you need without the trauma and expense of giant IT projects.
- For the community – Join the campaign. Stop feeding the demonising narrative. Show how Excel, when designed properly, already delivers everything the alternatives promise—and more.
A Call to Action: Excel Fights Back
This is a David vs. Goliath battle. But it’s one worth fighting.
Every transformation from traditional Excel to client-server Excel proves the point. Every success dismantles the false narrative. Every demonstration shows that the emperor has no clothes.
I proved it in my career—tripling my pay four times by spotting and delivering this transformation. You can do the same.
So here is my appeal.
Learn about Excel in the Digital Librarian model. Look beyond “modern Excel” as it is currently taught. See how centralising the data while keeping Excel as the agile client changes everything.
Because when you do, you’ll see what I saw back in 1998. Only now, the opportunity is ten, maybe a hundred times greater.
And that is where the future lies.
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