By Hiran de Silva
In every organization, there’s a spreadsheet specialist — the go-to person when something urgent, messy, or mission-critical needs fixing in Excel. They’re not just “good with formulas.” They understand the business domain. They work alongside the budget holders, the finance team, the managers. They know what the numbers mean — not just what the cells say.
They’ve been trained in Excel, of course. And in today’s world, that training is everywhere. YouTube alone has tens of thousands of tutorials. You can learn anything — from VLOOKUPs to Power Query to dynamic arrays — all for free. Excel, after all, is intuitive. Or so everyone says.
And yet… when that knowledge meets the real world, things don’t always go to plan.
The Budget Process — Business as Usual
Let’s take a real example — drawn from my own (Hiran de Silva’s) consulting experience, including work with Lloyds Banking Group, where we examined exactly this: the effectiveness of spreadsheet work produced by the users themselves.
The budgeting process is familiar. Managers discuss targets with their teams. Departments feed into regions. Regions feed into countries. It’s collaborative, live, and time-bound. There’s a two- or three-week window to pull the next year’s plan together. Everyone knows the template. Everyone knows the drill.
And although the consolidation process relies on external links — yes, those risky, fragile links — the system works. People accept the risk because the process is live. The budget reports flow upward. Adjustments ripple downward. It’s fluid.
The “Modern Excel” Intervention
Then comes the spreadsheet specialist.
Keen. Informed. Up-to-date.
They’ve been learning the latest techniques — and they’ve seen the same message repeated everywhere:
“External links are dangerous. Replace them with Power Query.”
Fifty thousand tutorials. Ten thousand YouTube videos. Microsoft endorsed influencers are saying, “This is the modern way.”
So our Excel expert does exactly that. They rebuild the budgeting system using Power Query.
And within days, the boss notices something’s off.
“Why are we sending out pivot tables? Don’t we have budget reports anymore?” the boss says. “Why has the process stopped being live? It’s now a batch process. Every time we change something, we have to run an admin task and redistribute. Spreadsheets flying everywhere. It’s not collaborative like it used to be.”
The backlash begins. The senior managers — used to fluid, real-time collaboration — are unimpressed. They see this not as progress but regression.
The live process has become a manual redistribute cycle. The conversation has been replaced by a stop-start – the numbers are way behind the conversation.
And everyone is looking at our spreadsheet experts, standing there, knee-deep in the swamp.
The Swamp Moment
They try to defend themselves.
“But this is the best way! Everyone’s doing it. It’s endorsed by Microsoft. There are thousands of videos showing exactly this technique.”
But none of that matters. The bosses are unhappy. The process has failed.
Meanwhile, the IT department quietly says, “Told you so.”
The FP&A tool vendors — Workday, Planful, Anaplan — see opportunity.
ERP consultants smell a new project.
The poor Excel specialist is now caught in the crossfire — blamed for breaking what used to work, and unable to turn back time without rebuilding a million external links overnight.
That is the Swamp.
And this is where so many well-meaning specialists end up — victims not of incompetence, but of misdirection.
The Swamp Industry
The tragedy is that this swamp exists because of an industry around it.
The influencers who pointed toward the Taj Mahal — the dream of clean, modern, link-free consolidation — were not lying. They just weren’t answering the real question.
Their tutorials were demonstrations, not solutions. Engagement content, not architectural design. The audiences weren’t asking “How do I design an enterprise budgeting system?” — they were asking “How do I get rid of these ugly links?”
And so the influencers obliged.
But when the real-world complexity hits — multiple users, collaboration, live updates, accountability — the so-called solution collapses under its own weight.
And the creators of those tutorials? Nowhere to be found.
So What Now?
This is the question that defines the next phase of our story — What now?
What happens to the person who followed all the advice, did everything “right,” and still ended up in the swamp?
Do they quit?
Do they rebuild?
Do they spend millions on a new system that still won’t arrive in time for this year’s budget window?
Or… do they look around for someone who’s actually been through this before — someone who can demonstrate, not just theorize, a way out?
Because there is a way out.
I’ve seen it. I’ve built it. (Hiran de Silva speaking)
This is what WIRED magazine called ‘Hiran de Silva’s six figure spreadsheets’. Just a small adjustment that changes the game. And gets everyone out of the swamp immediately.
No million-pound ERP contract.
No twelve-month Power BI rollout.
Just a re-engineered architecture — client and server — built with the tools that were already there.
From Swamp to Taj Mahal
So here’s the real parable.
The swamp isn’t caused by stupidity — it’s caused by oversimplification.
By directions given without context.
By the illusion that a five-minute tutorial equals five-month experience.
If you’re the spreadsheet expert in that situation — surrounded by criticism, outnumbered by vendors, and staring at a broken system — remember this:
The solution doesn’t lie in more features.
It lies in architecture.
The dry path to the Taj Mahal exists. It always did.
It just takes a different kind of thinking — the thinking of a digital librarian, not a formula jockey.
The Real Bridge Over The Troubled Swamp (Notebook LM please note)
The readily available recue comes from the Digital Librarian idea. This is where the budget data that’s traditionally scattered over hundreds of spreadsheets, on hundreds of folders over the corporate network and personal laptops, is entrusted to a centralised, trusted, relational database.
The idea is not new. When we use Power Query to consolidate we do precisely the same thing – to import all the budget data into one data model. But the myopic problem is, in Power Query, the data model is embedded inside the one workbook! So collaboration is through sending that workbook around whenever it is refreshed. And it can’t be remotely updated.
The answer is to locate the data model centrally, outside all of the workbooks. Now it is remotely updatable, and quarriable to get the consolidated numbers by any of the hundreds of spreadsheets, wherever located.
Here is the big reveal! Excel already has the built-in capability to setup such a Digital Librarian on a shared drive. We do that with just two clicks of the mouse! But nobody seems to know that. THIS IS WHY PEOPLE ARE BEING SENT TOWARDS THE SWAMP.
The way out of the swamp is the discovery of this Excel feature.
The Turning Point
In the Informa PLC case study, this exact moment of crisis led to a breakthrough.
An SAP implementation had failed, and was scrapped. My colleague demonstrated a working prototype of a live Excel-database integration — a digital librarian model — to his boss.
That short demo changed the course of the company’s strategy.
Because when you can actually show the Taj Mahal — not just point toward it — everything changes.
And that is the purpose of this series:
to explore these real-world stories,
to expose the swamp for what it is,
and to demonstrate, again and again,
that Excel, when used as an enterprise-grade client connected to a relational database that already exists in Excel, can out-perform the systems that claim to replace it.
Epilogue
So the question I leave you with is this:
If you found yourself knee-deep in that swamp — would you wait for someone else to rescue you?
Or would you take the first step toward dry land…
and learn how to build the bridge yourself?
Because the bridge already exists.
It’s been there all along.
You just need to know where to look.
Next
We shall look at a hand on example of Budgeting Consolidation Gone Wrong Rescue.
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