Or
- “Before You Click ‘Follow’: Where Is Your Excel Advice Really Coming From?”
- “The Missing Context in Excel Influencer Culture”
By Hiran de Silva
1. The Missing Context
When you scroll through Excel tips on LinkedIn or YouTube, have you noticed something missing?
Almost no one tells you where they’re coming from — what their experience is, what kind of problems they’ve actually solved, or even what kind of users they’re speaking to.
And that context matters enormously.
2. Different Origins, Different Objectives
Let’s look at a few possible origins for Excel content:
- Operational management users — people who’ve lived inside real business processes. They know what works under pressure, when your spreadsheets feed a board report or a £10m budget.
- Developers and engineers — technically gifted, fascinated by how Excel works under the hood.
- Microsoft marketing voices — promoting the latest features, often tied to sales objectives.
- Training graduates and enthusiasts — learning as they teach, re-sharing whatever seems new or popular.
- Pure social-media influencers — people whose main business is getting clicks, not delivering results. For them, Excel is just a trending topic — it could as easily have been fitness tips or travel hacks.
Each of these groups can create content that looks useful. But the reason behind it — and the world they live in — is completely different.
3. Why This Matters to You
If your goal is to:
- be noticed by your boss,
- get promoted,
- become the person who can actually fix things and deliver value to management—
then your real customer is your boss and your boss’s boss, not a YouTube algorithm.
You’ll need to focus on methods that make enterprise processes faster, more reliable, and easier to control — things like database-connected spreadsheets, scalable consolidations, and automation across teams.
That’s what senior management wants.
4. The Wrong Customer
But the influencer economy trains you to serve a different “customer.”
Every time you like, share, or comment, you’re doing free work for a creator whose priority is engagement — not your promotion. They cannot give you a pay rise, or visibility, or influence inside your company.
And the techniques they teach — stand-alone files, Power Query inside a workbook, one-person automations — are exactly what cause Excel Hell in large organisations. They’re local tricks, not enterprise systems.
5. A Case in Point
A 2022 white paper by the Business Partnering Institute, sponsored by a cloud-based FP&A tool, listed the “20 most influential Excel experts” to follow. Every single one of them teaches methods for single-user spreadsheets — not enterprise-scale data flow.
That’s like giving you a list of great brush painters when what your CFO needs is someone who can use a spray gun to paint the entire wall.
6. Why Background Matters
That’s why I appreciate creators like Puneet Gogia, who openly share where they came from — the kind of work they’ve done, the problems they’ve faced. It tells you what world their advice belongs to.
Without that, you’re taking lessons from someone whose goals, experience, and incentives are completely detached from your own.
7. The Takeaway
Before you follow anyone, ask:
“Who is this person actually serving — their followers, or their boss?”
If you want to impress your boss and your boss’s boss, then you need to follow those who’ve actually built and delivered systems in that world — not those chasing clicks in another one.
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