By Hiran de Silva
When it comes to Excel education, there are two pyramids we need to talk about. One is widely shared and often celebrated. The other is rarely acknowledged but far more important if you want to escape Excel Hell and create real business value.
Understanding the difference between these two pyramids is the key to transforming from an “Excel user” into a genuine process innovator—one who can solve management’s biggest headaches.
The First Pyramid: Features and Skills
The first pyramid is the one many will recognize. It has been promoted by groups such as the Global Excel Summit and countless training programs.
- At the bottom of the pyramid sit the beginners, the novices who are just starting out.
- As you move up, you encounter the intermediate features—lookups, pivot tables, conditional formatting, etc.
- At the top, you reach the advanced skills—array formulas, VBA, Power Query, DAX, and so on.
The shape of the pyramid makes sense: the base is broad because there are many beginners, and it narrows toward the top because fewer people master the advanced material.
The implicit message is simple: the more features you learn, the higher you climb. And if you reach the summit, you will have achieved Excel mastery.
There is some truth to this. Advanced features do test aptitude. Not everyone will push through, and those who do can be proud of their technical achievement.
But this pyramid, for all its visibility, hides a dangerous flaw.
The Second Pyramid: Aspirations and Real-World Value
The second pyramid is about aspiration rather than features.
At the bottom, again, are the novices. Their work is narrow, task-based, and “inside the box.” Most will stay here for the entirety of their careers, not because they lack skill, but because their aspirations are limited to doing their work better inside the same box.
Some will push higher. Encouraged by the first pyramid, they’ll invest time and energy into learning “advanced Excel.” They’ll dive into Power Query, M code, or reconciliation tricks. They’ll follow influencers who promote formulas and hacks as the way forward.
But here’s the trap: instead of escaping the swamp, they sink deeper into it.
The Swamp and the Ceiling
The second pyramid has a ceiling—a hard limit on what those inside-the-box skills can deliver.
No matter how much Power Query you learn, no matter how many exotic formulas you master, you eventually hit the wall. You reach the swamp known as Excel Hell:
- Consolidations that break at scale.
- Budget reviews that grind to a halt.
- Reconciliations that take days instead of seconds.
- Solutions that only work for one user, on one machine, with one dataset.
This is where many well-meaning learners get stuck. They believe they’re climbing higher, but in reality they’ve only perfected the art of building taller walls around the swamp.
Management’s Summit
Meanwhile, at the true summit of the pyramid lie the problems that really matter to management:
- Rolling up hundreds of budget templates.
- Enabling multiple contributors to update shared data.
- Running live reconciliations across disparate systems.
- Making data current, consolidated, and transparent for decision-making.
If you can solve these problems, you don’t just become “advanced.” You become a superhero. You become the person who saves weeks of staff time, who unblocks decision-making, who transforms a struggling process into a scalable solution.
But here’s the irony: nothing in the first pyramid prepares you for this. In fact, chasing its summit only ensures you stay stuck in the swamp.
The Surprise: It’s Easier Than You Think
What surprises most people is that the skills required to escape the swamp are simpler than the complexity they’ve been told to chase.
Instead of memorizing obscure M code or chaining 12 nested functions, you shift mindset:
- From inside the box to end-to-end process thinking.
- From piling features into a single workbook to separating data and logic.
- From painting purple squares with a brush to spraying the entire wall with a spray gun.
This is not rocket science. Anyone can learn it. The barrier is not complexity—it’s awareness.
Empirical Tests That Prove the Point
We don’t have to speak in theory. We can test this empirically by reframing popular Excel challenges.
- Power Query Budget Consolidation
- Taught widely as a clever trick.
- Breaks immediately when scaled across hundreds of contributors.
- Solved instantly with a hub-and-spoke model and database integration.
- Budget Review
- Traditional Excel techniques force commentary on misleading numbers.
- With the right architecture, the real story emerges clearly and instantly.
- Reg Call Handler Demonstration
- A problem considered impossible by experts.
- Solved elegantly with a few lines of SQL through Excel.
- Oz du Soleil’s Christmas Expenses Challenge
- A popular tutorial that works fine for hobbyists.
- Collapses in a real-world finance process.
- Solved with a scalable, repeatable framework.
- Mark Proctor’s Account Reconciliation
- A viral method using Power Query.
- Overcomplicated, slow, and fragile.
- Outperformed by a far simpler VBA + database approach.
In every case, the mainstream pyramid leads straight to the swamp. The alternative mindset—what I call the Digital Librarian approach—delivers results management actually needs.
Clearing the Misconceptions
On this journey, you’ll encounter common misconceptions:
- “Databases take a year to build.” (Mark Proctor)
- “Databases require corporate governance and high-level approval.” (also wrong)
- “Databases are inaccessible to citizen developers.” (patently false)
- “Users should never update a database.” (Paul Barnhurst – but then, what’s the point of a data warehouse?)
- “Power Query’s data model is a database.” (Christopher T. Fennell – no, it’s not.)
These beliefs all stem from confusing the first pyramid with the second. They assume the swamp is all there is.
The Way Forward
If you want to move beyond the swamp, stop climbing the wrong pyramid. The way forward is not more features. It’s not “advanced Excel.”
It’s a shift in mindset:
- From skills to solutions.
- From features to frameworks.
- From inside-the-box tricks to end-to-end processes.
That is how you move to the summit of the second pyramid, where the biggest headaches live—and where the real opportunities to create value exist.
Conclusion
The two pyramids explain why so many Excel users get stuck.
- The first pyramid (skills/features) promises mastery but leads to the swamp.
- The second pyramid (aspiration/value) reveals the ceiling—and the superhero opportunity beyond it.
Ironically, the skills needed to escape the swamp are not harder but simpler—when approached with the right mindset.
This is why I demonstrate, again and again, through case studies and challenges, that anyone can become that superhero. But only if they stop climbing the wrong pyramid.
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