By Hiran de Silva
Or: Much ADO About Everything!
Or: How Satya Nadella stole my idea – FOUR years earlier!
It began, as these things often do, by accident.
I had just started a temporary job at Edexcel — a major national and international examinations body — doing routine reconciliation work. Nothing glamorous. I was a temp, buried somewhere in the lower floors of a vast organisation. But I had already attracted attention. A few weeks earlier I had solved a problem that the IT department and their expensive consultants had declared impossible.
That little act of defiance had made its way upstairs. The Board had noticed — particularly the Finance and IT Director, a chartered accountant, John Unsworth, who oversaw both departments. He told me, in so many words, “You’ve got freedom. Explore. Innovate.”
And so I did.
The Curiosity
As an engineer by nature and Batchelor of Science, My instinct was to understand how things worked — not just what buttons to press. So I began exploring the Excel Object Model through the only teaching aid we had in those days: the macro recorder. Every professional of that generation will remember it — our microscope into Excel’s inner workings. You’d perform an action, record a macro, and then study the code to see what objects, properties, and methods were being invoked behind the scenes.
Around the same time, I tried using Data > Get External Data — what was then called Microsoft Query, bundled with Excel 5 on Windows 3.1.
When I clicked it, an error appeared. The feature wasn’t installed. I called IT support and spoke to a man named Dave West, whose calm, matter-of-fact voice I’ll never forget.
“That feature isn’t part of the standard installation,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because users aren’t advanced enough to use it.”
There was a pause. Something in me protested. How would they ever become advanced enough if it was hidden from them?
I asked if he could install it. He politely said no — “You’re a temp. And you’re the only one asking.” (his actual words were ‘to be honest Hiran, no one has asked for it so far’)
That might have been the end of the story — but for the fact that I now had direct access to senior management. I mentioned it to my superior John Hood, and within hours IT were instructed to install Microsoft Query on my machine.
That single decision changed everything.
The Experiment
Microsoft Query came with its own manual — a small book, separate from Excel’s main guide. It explained how to connect Excel to an external database using a new protocol called ODBC (Open Database Connectivity). This allowed any application to connect to any database, regardless of brand.
I was familiar with Access and had it installed locally, so I connected Excel to an Access table, recorded a macro, and examined the generated VBA code.
What I saw stopped me cold.
Inside the macro was a line that contained a SQL SELECT statement — the very language of databases. It was something like:
SELECT Field1, Field2 FROM MyTable;
A thought flashed through my mind — one of those moments where curiosity trumps convention.
“If Excel can send a SELECT statement to Access… what would happen if I changed it to an INSERT or UPDATE?”
There are four basic SQL verbs — Create, Read, Update, Delete — collectively known as CRUD. Microsoft Query only used Read. But what if I changed it?
So I did.
I replaced the SELECT with an INSERT. I ran the macro.
Then I opened the Access database.
There it was — a new record, created directly from Excel.
I tried UPDATE. It worked.
I tried DELETE. It worked.
That was the moment.
The epiphany.
Excel wasn’t just a spreadsheet. It was a client.
Access was the server.
And together they formed a client–server architecture.
Exactly what I call The Digital Librarian in my teaching now.
The Power Unleashed
I realised instantly what this meant. Excel could read from and write to any relational database.
From that day forward, I built every solution using that principle. I could automate reconciliations, manage budgets, consolidate accounts, and control processes across multiple departments — all without deploying a single new system, buying a single new license, or asking IT for permission. Everything ran within the empowerment users already had.
It was quiet revolution — digital transformation without disruption.
Soon after, Edexcel faced a serious audit crisis. The national regulator, QCA, could not reconcile data across departments; audits had stalled. I was asked if I had any ideas.
Yes — I had one.
Using my newly discovered method, we built a system that joined those data islands together. The auditors signed off. Management breathed again.
This works, unattended, forever.
What began as a six-week temp job turned into a six-year engagement. My rate rose from the bottom of the pay scale to seven and a half times that figure. The total billing of my work there, in today’s money, exceeded £1.4 million.
And that was just the beginning.
The Ripple Effect
Every client thereafter recognised the same power. A short engagement became a long one. A four-week project turned into a three-year transformation. Another client quadrupled their budget within fifteen minutes of meeting me — simply because I demonstrated that Excel could do what their IT and ERP vendors said was impossible; and I could lead the transformation.
This architecture — Excel as the front-end, Access or SQL Server as the back-end — became my professional signature. It was fast, flexible, and governed. The IT department didn’t feel threatened because everything stayed within the Microsoft ecosystem.
And yet it outperformed the multimillion-pound systems they had been trying to implement.
The Connection I Discovered Later
Years later, a colleague from Mumbai, Kamal Bharakhda, sent me a YouTube clip — a young Satya Nadella, then an engineer at Microsoft, demonstrating something in December 1993 on their quarterly tech broadcast called DevCast.
In the clip, Nadella recorded a macro showing how Excel executed a SQL statement behind the scenes. Watching it, I froze.
He was doing exactly what I had stumbled upon four years later — the very genesis of what would become ADO, ActiveX Data Objects in 1996.
That short demonstration became the seed of Microsoft’s vision for the Digital Nervous System, a phrase Bill Gates popularised in his second book Business @ the Speed of Thought. The idea was that when something happened in one part of the business, the effects would cascade automatically across the enterprise — because the data itself was connected.
That was precisely what I had discovered in practice — independently, in a quiet corner of Edexcel.
The Irony of History
Decades later, I saw another viral YouTube video. An influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers was teaching how to manage stock levels in Excel — on a single machine, for a single user, on a single spreadsheet.
It had 100,000 views. People were calling it “brilliant.”
And yet, it would never work in a real multi-user environment. The very scenario the video described — collaborative stock management — was impossible in that ‘inside the box’ design.
The irony is profound. While social media celebrates the “copy and paste” version of Excel, the enterprise version — the one that was already architected to connect, scale, and automate — remains largely unseen.
The Legacy
That day, recording that macro and changing a single word from SELECT to INSERT, I had no idea I was standing on the edge of something monumental.
It was my first encounter with what would later be formalised as ADO — a bridge between Excel and the relational world of data. It embodied the principle that business systems could think and respond as one — the digital nervous system in action.
That discovery changed my clients’ fortunes. It changed my own.
And it revealed something deeper:
That true transformation rarely begins with technology itself —
but with curiosity, courage, and the willingness to ask,
“What happens if I change this one word?”
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