By Hiran de Silva
Imagine two neighbouring countries. In one, people love apples. In the other, people love oranges. Farmers in each country grow what their people want. Everyone’s happy.
But then a problem arises. Apple farmers realize they can’t sell enough apples at home. So they cross the border and begin marketing apples to the orange-loving country. Nothing wrong with that—some people in Orange Country may genuinely like apples.
The trouble begins when the apple marketers don’t simply promote the virtues of apples, but start spreading falsehoods about oranges. “Oranges make you sick.” “Oranges don’t scale.” “Orange Hell is inevitable.”
These messages are deliberately crafted to sow doubt, to create fear, and to chip away at the confidence of people who are otherwise perfectly content with their oranges. And they work—until someone stops to test the claims.
The Flawed Narrative
This is exactly how the “alternatives to Excel” industry has marketed itself for two decades. Their white papers and sales pitches repeat the same mantras:
- Excel cannot scale.
- Excel causes errors.
- Excel Hell is inevitable.
Yet the evidence says otherwise. Anyone with professional-level understanding of Excel architecture knows that the very same client-server model, the very same database integration, the very same enterprise scalability touted by cloud FP&A tools can be implemented with Excel as the front end. It isn’t even “advanced Excel”—it’s what Excel has always been capable of when used with proper design.
Why Not Sell Apples to Apple Country?
Here’s the real question: if apples are so good, why aren’t Apple Country farmers convincing their own people? Why the obsession with undermining oranges? Why the endless white papers that attack Excel instead of simply proving their product’s worth on its own terms?
The irony is painful: many CFOs buy cloud alternatives to Excel because they’ve been told that Excel cannot be architected like a client-server system. That is false. Demonstrably false. And when senior managers are shown that Excel can be deployed with the same architecture as the cloud product—more agile, more flexible, and with broader use cases—their reaction is almost always the same:
“If we had known this, we would never have limited ourselves to the cloud-only option.”
The Experiment Anyone Can Run
Don’t take my word for it. Run the test yourself. Show any CFO how a properly architected Excel system consolidates hundreds of inputs, scales globally, and integrates seamlessly with a relational database. Then ask: Would you still have chosen the cloud system if you knew Excel could do this?
The answer, nine times out of ten, is “No.”
The Final Irony
And here’s the kicker: even after buying the so-called alternative, those same CFOs find themselves surrounded by spreadsheets anyway. Spreadsheets for input. Spreadsheets for output. Spreadsheets to fill the gaps the cloud product can’t handle.
So the orange growers end up buying apples they didn’t really need—while still eating oranges every day.
The Bottom Line
The “Excel can’t scale” narrative isn’t a neutral observation. It’s a marketing tactic. A convenient half-truth repeated until it sounds like common sense. But it collapses under scrutiny.
Excel can scale. Excel can consolidate. Excel can run client-server architecture with the same efficiency as any cloud FP&A tool—and with greater agility.
The sooner the market acknowledges this, the sooner CFOs can stop paying for apples they don’t need—while still reaching for oranges to get the job done.
👉 Call to Action: If you’re a finance leader, don’t accept the sales pitch at face value. Test the claim for yourself. Discover what Excel can actually do when it’s done well. The results may surprise you.
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