A direct response to Mark Proctor — and the Power Query consensus
By Hiran de Silva
Mark Proctor recently asked a fair and important question:
If Excel keeps getting more powerful, why aren’t companies spending more on training?
At first glance, it looks like a mystery. Excel has gained extraordinary capabilities over the past decade—Power Query being the most heavily promoted. And yet, corporate appetite for Excel training remains stubbornly flat.
This is often framed as a failure of leadership or short-sighted management.
In my experience, it’s neither.
It’s a mismatch of outcomes.
The uncomfortable truth: training is being sold to the wrong audience
There is no doubt that Power Query is a powerful feature. It solves a very real problem:
- Broken links
- Fragile consolidations
- Spreadsheet “houses of cards”
For someone working at ground level—the analyst in the back room receiving 400 budget templates—Power Query feels like salvation. It replaces chaos with order. It works. And it’s no surprise that influencers like Christopher T Fennell and others can demonstrate it brilliantly.
From that vantage point, Power Query looks like best practice.
But that is not the vantage point that decides corporate training budgets.
Ground-level success, top-level failure
Let’s talk about annual budgeting, because it exposes the problem cleanly.
A real enterprise budgeting process involves:
- Hundreds of budget holders
- Multiple management layers (city → country → region → group)
- Live negotiation over weeks
- Continuous visibility, trust, and auditability
Historically, spreadsheets did support this kind of collaboration. Live links existed as far back as MultiPlan in 1982. But those models were fragile. One broken link, one overwritten formula, and the whole structure collapsed.
Power Query was sold—correctly—as a cure for that fragility.
But in curing one disease, it introduces two new ones.
What Power Query breaks (from management’s perspective)
1. It turns a live process into a batch process
Consolidations are no longer live. They exist only when someone refreshes, publishes, and redistributes them.
Management doesn’t work in batches.
They work in meetings, negotiations, challenges, and decisions—in real time.
Waiting for a refresh is not a technical inconvenience.
It’s a workflow failure.
2. It replaces familiar management reports with pivots
Senior managers do not want pivot tables. They want:
- The same P&L layout they’ve used for years
- Immediate confidence that numbers add up
- Drill-down on demand, during the conversation
Power Query optimises the mechanism.
Management cares about the outcome.
Why management quietly rejects “modern Excel”
From the top of the organisation, the pattern looks like this:
“Every few years, a new Excel breakthrough is introduced.
It’s more complex.
It requires more specialists.
And somehow, the business becomes slower, not faster.”
After a decade of Power Query-driven solutions that:
- Remove live collaboration
- Multiply versions
- Insert intermediaries between question and answer
management doesn’t see progress.
They see regression dressed as sophistication.
That is why they don’t buy the training.
Excel as a document vs Excel as a platform
Here is the fork in the road that the influencer debate avoids.
Excel as a document
- Hundreds of files
- Data lives inside spreadsheets
- Consolidation is something you run
Power Query fits perfectly here.
Excel as a platform
- One master template
- Data lives centrally
- Consolidation is something you ask for
This is what management actually needs.
The outcome management wants (and recognises instantly)
In my budgeting demonstration:
- There is one template
- It contains no data
- Budget holders retrieve and save their slice
- Managers retrieve live consolidations instantly
- Drill-down works during the meeting
- No files are emailed
- No versions proliferate
Everything updates in real time, globally.
And the shocking part?
Nothing new is bought.
No licences.
No platforms.
No Power BI.
No Power Query pipelines.
Excel creates a small relational database (ACCDB) in seconds and uses it as a Digital Librarian—a trusted, central source of truth.
Excel has had this capability since Excel 97.
The Theodore Levitt problem
Theodore Levitt famously said:
Customers don’t want a quarter-inch drill bit.
They want a quarter-inch hole.
Power Query advocacy is obsessed with the drill bit.
Management is staring at the wall saying:
“That’s not where we want the hole.”
And when management says that, the response they often get is:
“You’ll have to get used to it.”
That is not how enterprise adoption works.
So why aren’t companies spending on training?
Because they are being asked to fund training for outcomes they actively reject.
- Social media rewards ground-level appeal
- Influencers optimise for engagement
- Management optimises for stewardship, trust, and speed
These incentives are not aligned.
Until Excel training realigns itself around enterprise outcomes, not tool brilliance, spending will remain flat—no matter how powerful Excel becomes.
Final note to Mark Proctor
When I first applied this architecture—using nothing more than Excel 97’s built-in capabilities—my client tripled my pay and kept me for six years.
Not because I knew more features.
But because I delivered what management actually needed.
That is the real training gap.
If you want next steps, I can:
- Tighten this into a LinkedIn article (8–10 scroll-stopping sections)
- Turn it into a TED-style script with a mic-drop reveal
- Extract a one-diagram visual that kills the Power Query vs Enterprise debate instantly
- Or rewrite it as a direct, polite open letter to Mark Proctor
Just tell me the format.
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