By Hiran de Silva
Another day, another LinkedIn post by a salesman from the Excel-bashing industry declaring, “Excel can’t scale.”
Let’s be clear.
This isn’t just false.
This is manufactured ignorance, weaponised for profit.
A straw man argument—built and paraded so the salesman can set it on fire, and then charge you $1 million to install sprinklers.
The real tragedy? The people falling for it don’t even realise the version of Excel being “defeated” isn’t even the real Excel. It’s a toddler version. Handicapped. Sandboxed. Deliberately misused.
🚫 The Straw Man Tactic: A False Comparison
The Excel-bashing industry’s go-to play is to compare:
- Novice Excel, built with links and formulas scattered across dozens of fragile workbooks,
- Against their own glossy, cloud-based, centralised solution.
And when novice Excel collapses under pressure, they smugly declare,
“See? Excel doesn’t scale.”
But that’s not Excel’s fault.
That’s like filling a Ferrari with diesel and blaming Ferrari when it stalls on the M1.
🧠 Real Excel Scales — By Design
What these salesmen won’t tell you is this:
Excel was designed from the start to scale.
Not with third-party plugins.
Not with duct-tape formulas.
But through its native ability to serve as a client to centralised relational databases, using ADO, SQL, and VBA.
This isn’t some advanced ‘ninja’ trick.
This is fundamental enterprise Excel.
It was showcased on global television more than 20 years ago.
📺 Remember DevCast?
In one of Microsoft’s most important global broadcasts—DevCast—a young Satya Nadella demonstrated Excel as an enterprise client, integrated with backend databases, automating planning, reporting, and analytics.
This was part of Bill Gates’ Digital Nervous System vision:
A connected world where information flows without friction, empowering real-time decisions.
“The key is to get the right information to the right people at the right time.”
— Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought
Excel was not some scrappy desktop tool in that vision.
It was a strategic gateway—a user-facing cockpit to the enterprise’s data backbone.
And it still is.
🧱 Excel Done Well vs. Excel Hell
When Excel is:
- Decoupled from formulas,
- Connected to a structured Access or SQL Server backend,
- Using GET/PUT methods to handle real-time data exchange…
…it becomes a boardroom-ready platform, powering consolidation, forecasting, reporting, and reconciliation—all without writing a single formula in the user layer.
That’s not Excel Hell.
That’s Excel done well.
💰 The Hidden Cost of the Lie
The narrative that “Excel doesn’t scale” has created a $100B+ market for tools and consultants who promise to “rescue” you from the very spreadsheet problems they themselves don’t understand.
They are profiting off:
- A deliberately broken use case,
- A community kept in the dark, and
- A systematic dumbing-down of what Excel is actually capable of.
This isn’t innovation.
This is sabotage with a sales target.
🔥 Time to Call It What It Is
It’s time the Excel community—and the wider business world—start calling this out.
“Excel can’t scale” is not a fact.
It’s a marketing tactic.
It’s a lie by omission.
It’s a wilful misrepresentation of a tool that’s been solving enterprise problems longer than most FP&A tools have existed.
And the worst part? The people saying this often don’t know Excel themselves.
They know just enough to sell you an alternative.
🧭 What Now?
Excel’s real power isn’t in flashy formulas or gimmicky charts.
It’s in its ability to behave like a client—pulling and pushing data across a robust, scalable architecture that’s fully auditable, transparent, and lightning fast.
If you’re in finance, strategy, ops, or planning and you’ve only ever seen Excel used like a calculator on steroids—then you’ve been sold the toddler version.
You’ve never seen the real thing.
It’s time to change that.
🎯 Final Thought
Excel doesn’t need to be replaced.
It needs to be understood.
And the moment it is, the $100 billion straw man collapses.
If you’d like to see what scalable Excel actually looks like—no formulas, no links, no chaos—just one-click real-time budgeting and reporting, ask for the Hiran Framework.
It’s not new.
It’s not advanced.
It’s just Excel, done properly.
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