By Hiran de Silva
Most people see only what’s in front of them.
They see what’s visible, what’s cosmetic, what can be captured on a screen.
But to really understand what’s going on, you have to learn to see what isn’t visible.
A Miss Marple Lesson
Last night I watched A Caribbean Mystery, a 2013 Miss Marple episode.
(If you plan to watch it, consider this a small spoiler.)
Miss Marple investigates a murder where the victim suddenly recognizes someone in the crowd just before being killed.
Everyone assumes the killer must be among the people he was looking at.
But Miss Marple notices one tiny detail: the victim had a glass eye that tended to wobble.
So although his face was turned toward one group of people, the direction of his glass eye meant he actually saw someone else—at a forty-five-degree angle.
He wasn’t looking where everyone thought he was looking.
And that invisible angle—what no one else saw—was the key to solving the case.
That’s classic Agatha Christie: the truth is hiding in plain sight, just outside the field of view.
Eight Angles on One Story
Another film came to mind: Vantage Point (2008), starring Dennis Quaid and Sigourney Weaver.
It tells the story of an assassination attempt on the U.S. President—eight times.
Each retelling shows the same event from a different person’s perspective.
Only when we’ve seen all eight do we finally understand what really happened.
Every new viewpoint reveals something the others missed.
Only the combination makes sense of the whole.
The Cylinder Illusion
It’s like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant: each touches a different part and reaches a different conclusion.
Or the geometric trick where one side of an object looks like a circle, another like a square—until you walk around it and discover it’s a cylinder.
Each angle tells a partial truth, but only together do they reveal reality.
Why This Matters for Excel
That’s exactly what happens in the world of Excel education.
Almost everything taught online is from a literal viewpoint—what can be shown and recorded on a screen.
If it can’t be demonstrated in a screencast, it’s rarely explained.
Concepts that are invisible—architecture, data flow, database logic, system design—stay hidden.
As a result, most learners understand Excel only from the visible perspective: formulas, charts, clicks, ribbons.
They never see the deeper layers—the architecture behind the scenes that makes enterprise-scale automation possible.
To solve big problems elegantly, you have to understand what you can’t see.
That requires creative, lateral thinking—the opposite of literal thinking.
The Mission Impossible Series
In my upcoming Excel Mission Impossible series, each episode begins with a familiar challenge—something that looks simple when viewed from a narrow, single-user angle.
You can find hundreds of these challenges online, all solved within the same visible frame: the screen, the worksheet, the one-off file.
But when you look at the same challenge from a different perspective—team workflows, live data, central databases, scale—you see something completely different.
You see how to turn the “impossible” into the obvious.
That’s what lateral thinking does.
It reveals the hidden architecture that the camera can’t capture.
Seeing the Invisible
So this blog is about perspective—and the danger of seeing only one dimension.
Whether in a murder mystery, a movie, or a spreadsheet model, the full truth often lies just beyond what’s visible.
When you change your vantage point, the problem itself changes shape.
And with that, new solutions and opportunities appear—things you couldn’t see before, but which were there all along.
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