By Hiran de Silva

Who truly benefits from Excel?

Ask the Excel influencer community and they’ll tell you it’s the millions of beginners learning VLOOKUP for the first time.
Ask the Excel Replacement Industry and they’ll tell you it’s themselves—because Excel generates the very pain that justifies their $100-billion SaaS market.
Ask Microsoft and they’ll point to “Modern Excel,” dynamic arrays, collaboration features, and Power Platform integrations that keep Office subscriptions flowing.

But ask the often-ignored fourth group—the one that actually runs the enterprise—and you’ll get silence.

Because the CFO/Controller/Finance-Leader audience is the only group not represented in the Excel ecosystem, despite being the stakeholder with the most to gain from what Excel is truly capable of.

This is the paradox at the centre of today’s corporate data world.

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1. The Interest Groups Around Excel—And Why They Shape the Narrative

Group 1: The Social Media Excel Influencer Community

Their incentive is reach.
Reach demands mass appeal.
Mass appeal demands beginner-friendly content.

So they produce:

• “10 Excel tips you didn’t know”
• “How to use XLOOKUP”
• “Dynamic arrays will change your life”

None of this is wrong.
But none of it serves enterprise-level finance.

Because explaining enterprise architecture, hub-and-spoke models, data separation, collaborative budgeting, relational databases, ADO, or Get/Put workflows would instantly shrink their audience by 95%.

So these topics get no airtime.

Result: A global conversation about Excel that never rises above single-user desk-level tasks.

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Group 2: The Excel Replacement Industry (Anaplan, Workday Adaptive, Planful, Datarails, etc.)

Their incentive is friction.
They need Excel to appear:

• fragile
• outdated
• unscalable
• uncollaborative
• ungovernable

Because that fuels their pitch:
“Excel is the problem; our platform is the solution.”

And, remarkably, the influencer community helps them—unintentionally—by portraying Excel as a personal productivity tool rather than an enterprise platform.

Result: Excel Hell becomes a marketing asset worth billions.

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Group 3: Microsoft

Microsoft’s incentive is subscription growth.
For that, they need:

• new features
• shiny demos
• Power Platform excitement
• social media buzz

They do not need to teach CFOs how Excel can run client-server processes, or how Excel can create and manage relational databases via Ace/ADO.

That doesn’t sell anything new.
It just reveals the depth of what already exists.

Result: Enterprise Excel capabilities remain undocumented, unmarketed, and misunderstood.

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Group 4: The Only Group Without Representation: The Finance Leader (CFO, Controller, Finance Director)

This is the group with:

• the largest pain from Excel Hell
• the largest budgets for transformation
• the highest responsibility for financial integrity
• the strongest need for scalable, collaborative, governed processes
• the greatest power to change how their organisation works

Yet this is the one group with no voice in the Excel ecosystem.

The influencers don’t speak to them.
The vendors speak over them.
Microsoft speaks around them.
And their own teams speak below them.

Nobody speaks to them.

And so CFOs inherit the misconception that Excel is “just a spreadsheet,” suitable for ad-hoc tasks but incompatible with enterprise processes.

That belief costs companies millions every year.

But here’s the twist:
Excel was built for the CFO more than for anyone else.

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2. What CFOs Don’t Realise: Excel’s True Value Has Nothing To Do With Formulas

At enterprise scale, Excel’s real power lies in:

• client-server architecture (data external, logic local)
• relational database backends (Access, SQL Server, Azure SQL)
• ADO Get/Put (the missing link in Excel education)
• hub-and-spoke process design
• centrally located data models
• independent, governed business logic
• fully auditable processes

These are the pillars on which budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, reporting, reconciliations, and operational models should be built.

And Excel has supported all of them since the late 1990s.

Not one of these appears in mainstream Excel training.
Not one appears in the influencer ecosystem.
And not one appears in the Excel Replacement Industry’s marketing.

Because the moment CFOs understand that Excel can do this, the industry narrative collapses.

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3. Why CFOs Are the Biggest Potential Winners

Because only one group has:

• the mandate to design end-to-end processes
• the authority to adopt enterprise architecture
• the insight to value flexibility
• the responsibility for speed, accuracy, governance, and cost
• the strategic need to eliminate Excel Hell

A controller fighting month-end does not need X-LOOKUP.
They need:

• clean data
• auditable trails
• reusable calculations
• scalable models
• automated submissions
• live reports
• full control over definitions and logic

This is precisely what enterprise Excel—properly designed—delivers.

Excel becomes not a spreadsheet,
but the CFO’s operating system.

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4. The Call to Finance Leaders: Reclaim Excel as Your Enterprise Tool

The CFO community is the missing stakeholder in a conversation that affects them more than anyone else.

It is time to change that.

Excel is not a toy.
Excel is not a relic.
Excel is not a bottleneck.

Excel is an enterprise-grade platform that has quietly shipped with:

• a relational database engine
• full SQL capability
• client-server integrations
• automation through re-engineering
• governance-friendly workflows
• scalable distributed models

for more than 25 years.

The industry has simply failed to teach it.

CFOs have the most to gain from reclaiming Excel:

• Lower costs
• Greater control
• Faster processes
• Cleaner reconciliations
• Better collaboration
• Reduced dependency on consultants
• Stronger data governance
• Happier teams
• More strategic value delivered to the business

When CFOs reclaim Excel,
the entire enterprise changes.

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Final Thought

Excel’s greatest irony is this:

The people who benefit most from Excel

have never been invited into the Excel conversation.

And the people who benefit financially from Excel’s weaknesses
control the narrative.

It’s time for finance leaders to take back ownership of this tool—
not as a spreadsheet, but as the enterprise engine it was always meant to be.

Excel belongs to the CFO.
It always has.
It’s time the ecosystem recognised it.