By Hiran de Silva
Alright.
Let’s do this properly.
You may have seen it.
The Nine Circles of Excel Hell.
A white paper that essentially says
Excel is chaos
Spreadsheets are fragile
And if you run anything serious on them
You’re basically one accidental delete away from corporate extinction.
And the punchline is always the same.
You need a proper system.
Preferably their system.
Now here’s the twist.
I’m not here to argue about Excel.
I’m here to expose a category error.
A misunderstanding so basic… that an entire industry has made a fortune repeating it.
Because the Nine Circles are not describing Excel.
They are describing a particular way of using Excel.
The way most people use it.
A shared ecosystem of individual manual documents.
And yes.
That is fragile.
That is painful.
That is spreadsheet hell.
But if you’re talking about enterprise…
Then the very first question is not
How powerful is Excel?
The very first question is
Where does the data live?
Because in enterprise, data is not supposed to live inside documents.
Documents are for presentation.
Data is for systems.
So here is my framing for the fight.
Data Liberation.
Separate the data from the spreadsheet.
Centralise it.
Control it.
Make it one version of the truth.
Then Excel stops being a document.
And becomes a client.
An interface.
A window.
And suddenly… the Nine Circles start collapsing like a cheap stage set.
Let’s walk through them.
Circle One. Oops.
Spreadsheets are fragile.
People delete rows.
They break formulas.
They corrupt links.
Disasters happen.
Yes.
Absolutely.
If the spreadsheet is the system.
But watch this.
Here’s a budget sheet.
Someone comes along and deletes half the rows.
Smashes the formulas.
Throws magenta formatting everywhere like it’s a nightclub flyer.
Completely wrecks it.
Now ask yourself.
Is this a disaster?
No.
Because the spreadsheet is not the system.
The data is.
So I hit Refresh.
And the spreadsheet instantly rebuilds itself from the master data.
And just like that… the so-called disaster disappears.
Mic-drop moment.
If a spreadsheet can be destroyed without harming the system,
it was never the system.
Circle One collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Two. Crush.
Consolidation is a huge pain.
Finance teams spend weeks consolidating 50 departments.
Rolling forecasts become a nightmare.
Okay.
Let’s take that claim seriously.
Here’s my model.
Not 50 departments.
400.
Four hundred.
Across 90 cities.
50 countries.
Five global regions.
And here’s the consolidation for Europe.
Now the white paper implies this should take weeks.
Months, in our case.
Maybe a consultant army.
Possibly a small sacrifice to the gods of FP&A.
So I change a dropdown.
Europe to France.
And Excel consolidates… in 0.7 seconds.
Pause.
Not seven days.
Not seven weeks.
Zero point seven seconds.
That is not an improvement.
That is an extinction event for the argument.
Mic-drop moment.
If consolidation takes months, you’re not doing consolidation.
You’re doing manual archaeology.
Circle Two collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Three. Brain Drain.
They say smart people waste time collecting and consolidating spreadsheets.
They didn’t get degrees to spend half their lives stitching files together.
Again, yes.
If you’re emailing spreadsheets around like party invitations.
But enterprise Excel is not emails.
It’s architecture.
In this model, every user has their own interface.
Their own budget sheet.
Their own responsibility.
They work independently.
But the data is shared centrally.
One version of the truth.
Everyone sees the same truth.
Collaboration is not achieved by everyone hacking the same document.
That’s not collaboration. That’s a bar fight.
Collaboration is achieved by shared data
and controlled interfaces.
Mic-drop moment.
Excel hell comes from document sharing.
Enterprise Excel comes from data sharing.
Circle Three collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Four. Finger in the Air.
They say spreadsheets can’t give real-time data.
They are historical snapshots.
You’re always chasing the latest number.
This is the one that makes me laugh.
Because it’s said with such confidence.
Disconnected spreadsheets can’t be real-time, they claim.
Yes.
If they’re disconnected from the data.
But these spreadsheets are disconnected on purpose.
Physically disconnected so they can scale.
So they can be independent.
So they can be safe.
And then… logically connected.
Because they refresh from the master data.
So every time someone clicks Refresh,
they are looking at the current truth.
From the same central source.
And that source can itself refresh from ERP, GL, payroll, whatever is running the business.
So no, you are not chasing the latest number.
You are looking at it.
Mic-drop moment.
Disconnected files are not the problem.
Disconnected data is.
Circle Four collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Five. Import Duties.
They say it’s hard to get non-spreadsheet data into spreadsheets.
Hours exporting from GL and manually configuring.
Sure.
If your process is export, pray, and paste.
But in enterprise architecture, this isn’t a daily ritual.
It’s plumbing.
Pipeline.
Automation.
You point the model at the tables.
You design the extracts once.
And then data arrives automatically when needed.
And here’s a real-world mic-drop.
A colleague of mine, Roger Waters Duke, built an ETL that checked the GL every two minutes.
If new transactions appeared, it pulled them down.
So the reporting database was never more than two minutes behind the ledger.
Two minutes.
Most organisations can’t even get a meeting in two minutes.
Circle Five collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Six. Mass Mess.
They claim spreadsheets are not a management information system.
Executives need dashboards.
Managers need reports.
Manual spreadsheets fall short.
And this is where the sales pitch tries to sound grown-up.
Excel is for amateurs.
Planning platforms are for adults.
Okay.
Let’s bring out the whiteboard test.
If a CEO draws what they want
a real management view of the business
with drill-downs, slices, accountability, reporting views
How fast can you deliver it?
With most planning platforms, the answer is
we can do something similar within our framework
but you cannot have exactly that
and if you want changes, we need a project
Translation.
Black box. Vendor lock-in. Invoice attached.
With Excel as a client to central data, the answer is
yes
tell me the logic
tell me the data
and we can build it
And here’s the killer feature.
Multiple group maps.
Same base entities.
Different ways to aggregate.
Regional view.
Management responsibility view.
Legal entity view.
Watch the dropdowns change as I switch group maps.
Same dataset.
Different dimension.
Mic-drop moment.
A management information system is not a product category.
It is an architectural capability.
Circle Six collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Seven. Flat Land.
They say spreadsheets are two-dimensional.
And as data gets more complex, spreadsheets become painful.
Multi-dimensional modelling needs something else.
This one sounds clever.
Because two-dimensional is true… visually.
But dimensions don’t live in the grid.
They live in the data.
The grid is just a window.
A lens.
If your data is structured properly
you can model across any dimensions you like.
And here’s what they conveniently ignore.
Scenario modelling is not static.
It evolves.
In a board meeting, someone asks
what happens if we do a 5% pay rise here
how does it impact P&L, cash, balance sheet, tax, transfer pricing
In a planning platform, you often get
that’s not configured
we need to scope it
we need a sprint
we’ll come back
In Excel, you get
give me the logic
we can have a prototype this afternoon
Mic-drop moment.
The problem is not Excel’s dimensions.
The problem is vendors selling frozen thinking.
Circle Seven collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Eight. Whodunit.
This is my favourite.
They say it’s hard to know who changed what, when, and why.
Audit trail goes cold fast.
Governance collapses.
Mistakes can’t be traced.
Very dramatic.
Forensic music.
CSI: Spreadsheet.
So let me show you something.
In this system, nobody touches anything without a login.
Every update is a Put.
A controlled upload.
To central data.
Stamped with user identity.
Now suppose a manager sees something suspicious.
Travel and subsistence in July suddenly spikes.
Who did that.
When.
Why.
They double-click.
Up pops the change history for that cell.
Version by version.
Time and user.
Joey changed it.
On this date.
At this time.
In version 23.
Now the manager doesn’t just see the cell.
They open that version of the entire budget.
They see the context.
And they realise
this was part of an approved travel initiative
Case closed.
Mic-drop moment.
If your data is liberated, your audit trail is automatic.
If your data is buried in files, your audit trail is fiction.
Circle Eight collapses.
Cross against it.
Circle Nine. Global Challenge.
They say global business is too complex for spreadsheets.
Multiple currencies.
Tax regimes.
Exchange rates.
Forecasting.
Consolidation.
A new dimension of complexity.
This one is the grand finale.
The final boss level.
The dramatic crescendo.
And it’s the most revealing.
Because everything they list there is not a software problem.
It’s a domain knowledge problem.
Tax knowledge.
Accounting knowledge.
Business knowledge.
Planning platforms do not solve that for you.
They cannot.
They do not know your business.
They do not know your contracts.
They do not know your drivers.
They do not know your risks.
They are like a taxi driver insisting they know where you live better than you do.
The real question is not
can the software handle complexity
The real question is
who controls the logic
In Excel, the people who know the business control the logic.
Finance. Strategy. Leadership.
The domain experts.
In many platforms, you end up begging a black box
to implement what you already understand.
Mic-drop moment.
Global complexity is not solved by buying software.
It is solved by empowering the people who understand it.
And with that, Circle Nine collapses too.
So what have we learned?
The Nine Circles do not describe Excel.
They describe Excel used like paper.
Excel used like email attachments.
Excel used like a substitute for architecture.
They are not nine circles of Excel hell.
They are nine circles of misunderstood Excel.
And the funniest part is this.
When you liberate the data
when you separate system from interface
when Excel becomes the client
Most of the so-called circles vanish
without you changing a single formula.
Just changing the thinking.
Final mic-drop.
There were never Nine Circles of Excel Hell.
There was only one circle.
The belief that spreadsheets are the system.
And once that belief dies,
the hell goes with it.
That’s the fight.
And yes.
It has begun.
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