Why Spreadsheets Exist (And Why Social Media Tells the Wrong Story)

By Hiran de Silva

There is a story about Excel that nobody tells.
Not influencers, not trainers, not software vendors, and certainly not the Excel Replacement Industry.

And yet every CFO knows this story — because they live in the consequences of it.

It is the story of why spreadsheets exist at all.

Not why social media says they exist.
Not why “modern Excel” marketing says they exist.
But why they exist in the real world — the world where business processes actually happen.

Let’s start at the beginning.

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1. Enterprise Systems Were Supposed to Run Everything

Every organisation owns a collection of enterprise systems — ERP, finance, HR, CRM, warehouse, procurement, billing.
These are the “big pipes” designed to carry the flow of business across the organisation.

In theory, they do the heavy lifting:

• transactions flow in
• processes run automatically
• reporting appears
• the organisation runs like a machine

In theory.

But anyone who’s ever worked in business knows what happens next:

The moment the implementation is complete —
the world changes.

New products, new reporting lines, new revenue models, new regulations, new business units, acquisitions, restructures…
Meanwhile the system stays exactly where it was on go-live day.

And modifying these systems is:

• slow
• expensive
• disruptive
• often technically impossible

So the business does what the business has always done.

It compensates.

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2. Before Excel, the Compensation Was Paper

Long before personal computers, staff filled the gaps manually.

No training required.

Just:

• A4 pad
• pencil
• ruler
• calculator

You’d head a few columns, jot down amounts, add them up, extend, multiply, find percentages, staple the sheets together, photocopy them, pass them around, and — crucially — feed the result back into the main system as a journal or adjustment.

That off-system detour kept the business moving.

Without it?

You would need to modify the enterprise system every time reality changed.
And nobody could afford that.

So the “paper-based off-system system” grew in importance — almost becoming larger than the system it was compensating for.

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3. Then the 1990s Arrived: Paper Became Digital

When personal computers finally reached every desk, the paper workaround didn’t disappear.

It simply moved into Excel.

Create new workbook → build model → save → email → copy → amend → forward → repeat.

Suddenly, the off-system detour wasn’t limited by paper anymore.

Spreadsheets could proliferate infinitely.

The result?

One spreadsheet becomes five.
Five become 50.
50 become 500.

Within days, a simple workaround becomes a parallel ecosystem — a world of linked files, personal drives, shared drives, cloud folders, and multiple versions of the truth.

And, crucially:

this new spreadsheet ecosystem no longer fed its results back into the enterprise system.

It became a self-contained, off-system world of its own.

This is where the trouble begins.

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4. The Pipes in the Desert: Why This Happens Everywhere

Imagine a desert.

You have water pipelines running through it (your enterprise systems).
They were designed to serve particular settlements — but they do not join up.

Why?

Because in real organisations:

• acquisitions bring incompatible systems
• departments protect their own tools
• IT has its own priorities
• no one owns the cross-functional flow
• integration projects are expensive
• data structures don’t match
• processes evolve faster than systems

So the desert ends up with pipes that run near each other but never connect.

What happens then?

People fill the gap.

They carry water in buckets from Pipe A to Pipe B — manually.

This bucket-carrying is your human chain.

It has existed for 70 years.

Spreadsheets are simply digital buckets.

Excel exists because enterprise systems don’t join up.

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5. Social Media Misses the Entire Point

Now compare this with the Excel landscape on social media.

What do you see?

• cleaning exported files
• transforming exported files
• analysing exported files
• dashboarding exported files

In other words:

export → Excel → do clever things → stop.

Almost nothing flows back.
Almost nothing closes the loop.
Almost nothing joins the pipes.

Power Query? ETL — extract, transform, load (into Excel).
DAX? Analysis on exported data.
Dynamic arrays? Local data manipulation.
Charts? Reporting on exported snapshots.

The entire ecosystem reinforces one direction of flow:

Systems → Excel → Nowhere.

It is an ecosystem designed around carrying buckets,
not an ecosystem designed for connecting pipes.

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6. The Overlooked Truth: Excel Can Already Bridge the Pipes

Here’s the part that almost no one realises — and the part I’ve demonstrated across dozens of real case studies:

Excel already has the capability to:

• write back
• push data
• update records
• orchestrate processes
• consolidate across entities
• manage workflow
• integrate end-to-end

Using technologies that have existed since the 1990s:

• the ACE database engine
• ADO
• SQL
• a hub-and-spoke architecture
• Excel as the intelligent client
• Access/ACE or SQL Server as the Digital Librarian

This is the Excel that never gets discussed on social media.

This is the Excel that removes the human chain.

This is the Excel that joins the pipes.

And this is the Excel that solves real problems for CFOs:

• budgeting
• forecasting
• reporting
• month-end
• reconciliations
• multi-entity consolidation
• budget review
• workflow control

Not as “export and analyse”.
But as systems integration using the spreadsheet as the front end.

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7. So Why Do Spreadsheets Exist?

The Gap. Always the Gap.**

Spreadsheets exist because:

• enterprise systems are rigid
• business reality changes constantly
• integration projects lag behind
• processes cut across multiple systems
• costs prevent endless system modification
• people need autonomy
• business doesn’t wait for IT

Spreadsheets fill the gap — the gap between how systems were designed and how the business operates today.

They are the digital evolution of the A4 pad and the calculator.

But unlike paper, spreadsheets proliferate — and because they proliferate, they create entire parallel universes of business logic.

Which brings us to the core point:

Excel did not create Excel Hell.
The gap created Excel Hell.

Excel is simply the tool that stepped into the gap when systems couldn’t keep up.

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8. The Real Future: Not More Buckets — Better Pipes

The future is not “more dashboards”,
or “more exports”,
or “more clever local transformations”.

The future is joining the pipes.

And the surprising truth — the part almost nobody knows — is that:

Excel is already capable of doing this.
Today.
With the tools everyone already has.

This is the Excel I demonstrate.
This is the Excel that CFOs actually need.
This is the Excel that bridges budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and month-end into one integrated flow.

It is the Excel that social media never shows —
because it is not built for tutorials,
but built for the real world.

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Final Word

If you want to understand Excel’s true purpose, ignore the content that floods your LinkedIn feed.

Spreadsheets do not exist because the world needs nicer charts.
They do not exist because we needed another way to analyse exported CSVs.

Spreadsheets exist because business systems leave gaps — and humans must fill them.

The question is no longer:

Why does Excel exist?
We know that.

The real question is:

Do we want to continue carrying buckets?
Or do we want to finally join the pipes?