Part 1: The Pyramid, the Purple Square, and the Spray Gun
This is the opening sound-bite for a series of demonstrations:
Excel education is broken — and it’s nobody’s fault.
That sentence tends to provoke strong reactions, but it’s carefully chosen. This is not an attack on Excel trainers, influencers, or learners. It’s an explanation of why Excel education has drifted away from where real business value actually lives.
To understand what’s gone wrong, we need to look at the pyramid.
The Pyramid Problem
At the bottom of the pyramid are the largest numbers of Excel users:
- individuals,
- freelancers,
- small teams,
- people early in their careers.
This is where social media naturally focuses. Not because anyone is malicious, but because that’s where the audience is. It’s also where learning is necessarily literal — what can be shown on a screen, step by step, inside a single workbook.
And that’s perfectly reasonable.
The problem begins when techniques designed for the bottom of the pyramid are implicitly presented as universal truths.
People then move up the pyramid:
- into larger organisations,
- bigger budgets,
- more stakeholders,
- more risk,
- more accountability.
They take with them the techniques they were taught — Power Query pipelines, increasingly elaborate formulas, ever more “clever” workbooks — and suddenly…
everything starts to fall apart.
The user doesn’t think, “I’ve reached the limits of the technique.”
They think, “What’s wrong with Excel?”
Nothing is wrong with Excel.
What’s wrong is the education lens.
Painting Inside the Purple Square
Most modern Excel education is about what happens inside the spreadsheet.
Inside the box.
Inside the purple square.
It’s about:
- clever transformations,
- elegant formulas,
- automation within the file,
- skills that are impressive on screen and easy to record.
Social media amplifies this because it has to. Video is a literal medium. You can only show what happens on the screen.
What you can’t easily show are the prior questions:
- What problem are we actually solving?
- Who else touches this data?
- How does this scale?
- Where does collaboration live?
- What happens when this person leaves the company?
Those questions don’t demo well on LinkedIn or YouTube.
But they are exactly the questions that matter higher up the pyramid.
The Spray Gun vs the Paint Brush
Here’s the key distinction.
At enterprise level, leaders don’t want artisans carefully painting inside a square. They want a spray gun:
- few moving parts,
- end-to-end flow,
- predictable outcomes,
- collaboration by design,
- robustness over cleverness.
The spreadsheet becomes a component, not the system.
Ironically, this idea is not controversial at all. It’s explicitly stated in professional guidance. For example, Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales places this front and centre.
Their very first principle of good spreadsheet practice is not about formulas, Power Query, or dynamic arrays. It is:
Understand how the spreadsheet fits into the overall organisation.
That single sentence immediately raises a fork in the road:
- Are we painting inside the box?
- Or are we designing the spray gun?
Yet if you review the vast amount of content produced around Excel’s 40-year anniversary — articles, webinars, memes, celebrations — almost all of it remains firmly inside the box.
The spray gun is barely mentioned.
Why This Becomes Fatal (Eventually)
The tragedy is that none of this is malicious.
Influencers teach what they know.
Learners learn what they can see.
Platforms reward what performs well on screen.
But over time, the industry drifts further and further away from real organisational value. Automation becomes an end in itself. Skill-building is promoted without context. Tools are celebrated without reference to outcomes.
People hit a ceiling — not because they lack intelligence or effort — but because the education they received was never designed for the level of responsibility they’ve reached.
That’s why Excel education is broken.
And that’s why it’s nobody’s fault.
What This Series Will Do
This series is not about blaming:
- Excel trainers,
- social media creators,
- or learners who followed the path laid out for them.
It’s about making visible what cannot easily be recorded on a screen:
- first principles,
- architectural thinking,
- collaborative design,
- and the difference between spreadsheet tricks and enterprise systems.
Only once those principles are understood does Excel reveal its true role — not as a purple square to paint in, but as a powerful component in a much larger spray-gun architecture.
Part 2 will show this, not with theory — but with a simple, concrete budgeting example that breaks at the exact point most modern Excel education runs out of road.⬇️ Download as Audio
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