By Hiran de Silva
This presentation is inspired by a recent video by Mynda Treacy, published in September 2025.
Mynda has played an invaluable role in guiding millions of spreadsheet users. She shows, with great clarity, how to create a form inside Excel, and how that form can populate an Excel table. It’s elegant, practical, and extremely useful for personal or team-level tasks.
But here’s an important observation:
Almost all social-media content about Excel is aimed at the broadest possible audience. The largest group. Beginners, novices, and those who are quite content to stay within their own box.
There’s nothing wrong with that—indeed, that’s why this content is so popular. But if you read the comments on any popular Excel video, you’ll see another demographic hiding inside the audience.
They ask questions like:
- How would this scale?
- Could I apply this in my work environment?
- Would this work across multiple regions, or for thousands of users?
These are exactly the kinds of questions senior management—the “boss of the boss’s boss”—is looking for.
And yet, social media content rarely answers them.
Why? Because the techniques being taught are not designed to scale.
This, over time, has given Excel a reputation in industry as a tool that cannot scale. A tool that is useful only for the small box, but not for the enterprise.
That perception is false.
And that’s where my work comes in.
A Scenario
Let’s take a topical example.
The chairman of a global organisation is an avid music buff. He owns a vast CD collection. He wants to know what CDs his staff around the world also have—tens of thousands of employees, in dozens of countries.
His requirements are:
- Every staff member should be able to submit their list.
- The master list should be instantly searchable by everyone.
- No spreadsheets should be emailed around.
- No administrator should need to manage it.
- It should run indefinitely, self-sustaining.
- And it should be built in Excel. At zero cost.
At first sight, this seems like a tall order.
And clearly, a personal solution like the one Mynda demonstrates—though excellent in its own context—would not work at this scale.
So how should we approach it?
The Leap to Enterprise Thinking
Pause for a moment and think.
The requirements make one thing clear:
- The data must be collected in one place.
- It must be accessible by all staff, through their own spreadsheets.
- It must be updatable by anyone, anywhere.
That means the solution requires a central database.
And that database must connect seamlessly with Excel.
Here is the crucial moment. Whether you move forward or stop here depends on whether you believe Excel can do this.
The good news is: it can.
And not only can it—it can do so simply, elegantly, and at zero cost.
Addressing Misconceptions
Many in the Excel and FP&A communities have assumed otherwise. Some argue that building such a system would take months, even a year. Others believe that ordinary staff could never handle it.
But both of those beliefs are wrong.
And I will demonstrate why.
The Comparison
Ironically, the code and architecture required to achieve this global solution are simpler than the local Office Script method.
What looks easy at the personal level becomes complex when pushed beyond its natural limits.
What looks impossible at the enterprise level turns out to be straightforward—if you use the right architecture.
That architecture is what I call the Digital Librarian model:
- Excel as the universal client.
- A relational database (e.g. Access or SQL Server) as the central hub.
- A simple GET/PUT interface that allows staff anywhere in the world to read and write securely, through their familiar spreadsheets.
Greater Bang for the Buck
This is what I mean by greater bang for the buck.
From the same software everyone already owns—Excel and Access—we can produce:
- Global reach
- Instant collaboration
- Zero administration
- Unlimited scalability
And the outcome is not just bigger, but qualitatively better: transparent, reliable, and infinitely extensible.
Closing
To be clear: Mynda’s teaching plays an essential role. It introduces database thinking to a mass audience in a way that is engaging and approachable.
My role is different. I serve the audience within the audience: the visionaries who want to step outside the box, to deliver solutions their boss’s boss’s boss will actually care about.
If you are one of those people, then this demonstration is for you.
Because Excel is far more powerful than most people think.
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