By Hiran de Silva
That’s the reaction I often get when I demonstrate one of my enterprise-grade Excel solutions.
To the literal spreadsheet user — someone who still sees Excel as a big sheet of digital paper — my work doesn’t fit their mental model. It’s too connected, too automated, too alive.
Their instinctive response: “That’s not a spreadsheet. That’s an app.”
But this raises a few deeper questions.
How do we actually define a spreadsheet?
Where does a spreadsheet end and an “app” begin?
And most importantly — does the person whose problem we’re solving really care what we call it?
If a solution delivers huge value — if it solves a problem that everyone else said was “impossible” — does it matter whether it’s labelled an app, a model, or a spreadsheet?
Surely, what matters is whether it works, whether it’s simple, and whether it creates value.
Yet, there’s a psychological barrier — a thick line in the minds of many spreadsheet users — that says: “This side is Excel. The other side is not.”
That line is untenable.
Because from the very beginning, Microsoft designed Excel and the rest of Office to connect seamlessly with external data — to be a client in a client-server architecture.
In my terms, that’s the hub-and-spoke model, or what I call the Digital Librarian architecture — a mindset and design principle that enables Excel to function as the intelligent front end of a collaborative business system.
This isn’t theory. The evidence has been there for decades.
Go back to December 1993.
In a Microsoft demo, a young Satya Nadella shows how a spreadsheet detects when inventory levels fall below the reorder point — and automatically triggers an order.
The stock data wasn’t in the workbook. It lived in an AS/400 enterprise database.
The magic wasn’t the formula — it was the integration.
That was 1993.
By the late 1990s, Bill Gates was calling it the Digital Nervous System — where events in one part of the business automatically trigger processes in another.
At the heart of that vision is what became ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) — the connective tissue that made Excel more powerful than anything else in the enterprise software landscape.
So when people insist, “That’s not Excel,” what they really mean is, “That’s beyond my current understanding of Excel.”
And that’s fine — but it’s a problem for them, not for the technology.
Because for millions of professionals, there’s an enormous, untapped opportunity to transform their chaotic, siloed, email-driven spreadsheets into elegant, connected systems that quietly automate collaboration across the organisation.
That’s where the productivity is. That’s where the value is. That’s where the future is.
Excel as an App is easier to understand, and implement, than Excel as a large sheet of paper.
This is easily proved!
So my message to those still drawing a hard line between “Excel” and “not Excel” is simple:
You’re standing at the edge of a gold rush — and if you stay inside that line, you’re going to miss it.
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