Excel as an App — The App-stein Files

By Hiran de Silva

This is about apps.
Only apps.
Spreadsheets as apps.

Not those. Those are Epstein files.
We’re talking about App-stein Files.

For the last ten or fifteen years, something fundamental has changed in how the world works, and most people haven’t noticed it, even though they live inside it every day.

We stopped working with documents, and we started working with apps.

Let me explain.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know the weather for the next seven days, you wrote a letter to the Meteorologi … the Weather Office. You wrote it on a physical sheet of paper, put it in a physical envelope, added a physical stamp, and posted it into a physical mail box. A physical van collected it, someone opened it, physically, read it, typed a reply, put that in another envelope, a physical one, and sent it back. Days later, you opened the reply and discovered what the weather was going to be last Tuesday. By then, half of that weather had already happened. And that was normal.

Why was that normal? Because communication depended on the physical movement of objects. Physical documents.

Today, nobody writes to the Weather Office. We tap the Weather app on our phone. No paper moves. No envelopes move. No physical postman moves. What moves instead is data, instantly, between applications. Between devices. Between countries even.

That’s the shift. We stopped moving documents and started moving data.

Now here’s the part that matters for Excel.

Most people believe they’re working digitally, but in Excel they’re still working as if it’s paper. We enter data into cells. We believe that data lives inside those cells, inside sheets, inside workbooks. And if someone else needs that data, what do we do?

We email the spreadsheet. Like posting a letter.

That is not digital thinking. That is document thinking. It’s the same thinking that goes back to clay tablets, papyrus, ledgers in ancient times, typewriters. And it’s exactly why this thing they call Excel Hell exists.

So now, this is the fork in the road.

There are two ways to use Excel. Excel as a spreadsheet, and Excel as an app. Most people only know the first.

Let me give you a simple example.

This is based on Oz du Soleil’s Christmas Expenses video. But we’re going to scale it up this way.

Six friends. Chandler, Monica, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey. They go on trips together. Dinners, hotels, theatre tickets. They’re now going to London. One person pays, the others, whoever, agree to pay their share. So, a simple question: who owes what?

Now add a few constraints. They’re all on different computers. Nobody is allowed to, or needs to, administer the process. It must run continuously, not just at the end of the trip. It must run forever. Gunther wants to extend the system to all of the customers of Central Perk. So, it must scale beyond six people to hundreds, maybe thousands. Everyone must have full transparency at all times, including a complete audit trail.

Most people get stuck immediately, because they’re still thinking of Excel as a spreadsheet. A document.

Here’s the alternative.

Each person has the same tiny Excel file. One sheet. About thirty kilobytes. They enter a claim and press Enter. That’s it.

At any moment, anyone can click a button and see exactly what they owe or are owed. They can drill down into every contributing item they owe or they’re owed. On each item, they can see who paid, who agreed to contribute, and how the balance was formed. Nobody consolidates anything. Nobody emails anything. Nobody runs the system. It just works. And it works forever. From their own Excel.

At this point, most people think they know what I’m describing. They think I’m talking about modern Excel. Clever formulas. Maybe Power Query. Maybe Power BI. Something new.

I’m not.

I’m describing Excel as an App. Excel talking directly to the data that’s centrally located. An app architecture.

Excel has this capability right now. Like, today. But nobody told you.

This works because the data does not live in the spreadsheet. Just like a weather app. Just like WhatsApp. Just like every serious application we use every day. Excel is the clever interface, not the filing cabinet.

When you convert Excel from a spreadsheet into an app, processes scale, systems connect, and complexity disappears. That’s why organisations pay you six figures for Excel solutions that work like this. Not because the spreadsheet is clever, but because the architecture is. And anyone can do it.

So this is the distinction. Excel as a document, versus Excel as an app.

If you pardon the topical pun, these are the App-stein Files.

But seriously, just like the Epstein Files …

Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.