From the Car Park to the Public Highway: Rethinking Excel Education

By Hiran de Silva

How old do you have to be to drive a car?
Most people will instinctively answer with the legal driving age. But the truth is, you can drive at any age—so long as it’s on private property. If your family owns a large car park or farm, you could learn to drive a vehicle years before you’re legally allowed on public roads. Children grow up driving tractors on farmland long before they sit a driving test.

Driving in that environment feels free. There are no traffic lights, no speed cameras, no pedestrians to worry about. You can do wheelies on a motorbike, race your friends, or even set up ramps to jump cars. And if you have an instructor, they might teach you tricks that look impressive in the car park but would be reckless—or outright illegal—on the road.

The key point: you don’t need to know a single road rule to drive in a car park. Your instructor doesn’t either. They may never have driven on a public highway themselves, and yet they can be considered “competent” within that limited environment.

But is this training sufficient for the real world? Of course not. To drive on a public highway you need far more: a license, an understanding of the rules of the road, and above all, the ability to safely interact with other road users. If you ignore those responsibilities, the consequences are serious—fines, bans, or worse.

Excel Education: Stuck in the Car Park

This is where Excel education finds itself today.

The overwhelming majority of Excel training happens in the “car park.” People are taught formulas, features, and tricks—sometimes with great enthusiasm—but rarely with the perspective of how spreadsheets fit into real business processes. Trainers can become experts in teaching these tricks without ever having worked in the “public highway” of enterprise responsibility: month-end consolidation, live budgeting systems, regulatory reporting, cross-departmental workflows.

Just as a child who only learns wheelies in a car park will be unprepared for city traffic, Excel users trained only in features are unprepared for the complexity of real business operations. They lack the mindset, principles, and architecture needed to handle collaboration, scale, compliance, and risk.

Why the Car Park Became the Default

Several forces have reinforced this limited approach.

1. Democratisation of computing. Excel spread rapidly because it was accessible to everyone. But with accessibility came informality. Most users never received training in enterprise-grade principles; they improvised instead.
2. System gaps. Spreadsheets usually arise where enterprise systems fail to cover a need. Because the official system “should have” solved the problem, spreadsheet builders often feel they are doing management a favour. That breeds a cavalier attitude: management should be grateful for any spreadsheet, no matter how fragile.
3. Microsoft’s marketing. Seeing the growth of this informal user base, Microsoft poured resources into creating “power features” that appeal to individual enthusiasts—Power Query, Power Pivot, Dynamic Arrays. These features encourage car park driving. They reward hobbyist experimentation rather than enterprise responsibility.

The result is a generation conditioned to believe that mastering features is equivalent to mastering Excel. In reality, it is like knowing every button and dial inside a car without knowing how to drive it safely from A to B.

The Missing Perspective

Driving on the public highway isn’t about showing off tricks—it’s about transport, responsibility, and outcomes. In business, the equivalent is delivering reliable processes that move the organisation forward.

Enterprise Excel requires:

• Architecture, not tricks. Understanding data flow, controls, and structure.
• Collaboration, not isolation. Spreadsheets rarely exist for one person alone; they interact with finance, operations, compliance.
• Responsibility, not improvisation. A poorly designed spreadsheet can misstate financials, distort budgets, and mislead leadership.

This is what is missing from the car park.

Time to Leave the Car Park

It is no longer enough for Excel education to remain in the safety of the car park. Trainers who have never driven on the public highway cannot prepare professionals for real-world business processes.

We need to raise awareness that spreadsheets in industry are not hobbies or personal tools—they are critical business infrastructure. They fill the gaps left by multimillion-dollar enterprise systems. That makes the responsibility enormous.

Learning wheelies and ramps may be entertaining, but organisations don’t need entertainers. They need drivers who can take the business safely from A to B—through traffic, over long distances, and with responsibility for others on the road.

Thought for leaders:
If your teams are still “learning Excel in the car park,” they may be unprepared for the public highway of enterprise responsibility. The question is not whether they know the latest features. The question is: can they get the business safely to its destination?