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Excel Fights Back

March 11, 2026

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A 30-Year Mis-Statement Is About to Be Tested

By Hiran de Silva

Over the last few days something interesting has happened.

Whenever someone on LinkedIn posts yet another attack on Excel — declaring it obsolete, dangerous, or incapable of enterprise work — some of my learned colleagues gallantly jump in to defend it.

And when they do, the discussion lands in my feed.

Which means I end up responding, the same way,

Again.

And again.

After several days of this, it struck me that perhaps the universe is trying to tell me something.

Perhaps this really is the battle.

Because the attacks on Excel are relentless.

But the most remarkable thing is this:

They are almost always based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Excel itself.

The Enormous Excel Education Industry

Let us begin by acknowledging something important.

The amount of Excel education available today is enormous.

And much of it is excellent.

Across YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and courses, thousands of educators are teaching powerful Excel capabilities such as:

Dynamic array formulas
LAMBDA functions
Power Query
M code
Modern formula techniques

These explainers are often brilliant.

They demonstrate sophisticated techniques clearly and generously to millions of learners.

But there is one critical observation.

Almost all of this education is focused on a single user working on a single spreadsheet performing a single task.

That is not a criticism.

It simply reflects where most Excel users live: the world of personal productivity.

Meanwhile… The Excel Bashing Industry

While this massive ecosystem of Excel education thrives, another industry runs alongside it.

The Excel replacement industry.

Companies promoting planning platforms, FP&A tools, and enterprise planning software regularly publish white papers and articles claiming that Excel is fundamentally flawed.

One of the most famous examples is:

Workday Adaptive Planning’s
“Nine Circles of Spreadsheet Hell.”

Recently rebranded as:

“Nine Circles of Spreadsheet Hell.”

The name changed.

The argument did not.

These papers portray Excel as chaotic, unscalable, dangerous, and fundamentally unsuitable for enterprise work.

And then they present their products as the solution.

But there is one very serious problem.

The Straw Man

The Excel they attack is not the Excel used in real enterprise architecture.

Instead, they compare their cloud-leveraged enterprise platforms

against

Excel used as a single-user document.

In other words:

They compare a full enterprise system

against

an isolated spreadsheet file.

This is not a level playing field.

It is the classic logical fallacy known as a straw man argument.

A Boxing Match With One Hand Tied

Imagine a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

But before the fight begins, one of the fighters has his hands tied behind his back.

Then the other fighter declares victory.

That is essentially what these comparisons look like.

The vendors compare their cloud-native enterprise platforms

against

Excel as a standalone document.

But Excel in the enterprise is not a standalone document.

It never was.

The Excel They Ignore

Excel in the enterprise operates very differently.

For decades it has been used in client-server architectures, storing their data in relational databases, integrated with enterprise systems, collaborative connected processes, and enterprise workflows.

Proper enterprise Excel architecture typically includes:

Centralised data storage
Client-server connectivity
Collaborative workflows
Controlled data flows
Consolidation across entities
Role-based permissions

In other words:

Exactly the same architectural environment that these vendors claim as their exclusive domain.

Yet in their comparisons, this Excel architecture is conveniently ignored.

Thirty Years of the Same Claim

I have seen this pattern for nearly three decades.

In the late 1990s, a company called Adaytum was making similar claims in live presentations.

I challenged them publicly.

Adaytum was later acquired by Cognos.

Years later, I attended a Cognos seminar.

The same claims were still being made.

Cognos was eventually acquired by IBM.

And today, the same narrative continues through a new generation of vendors.

Different companies.

Same argument.

Same flawed narrative.

The Reality I Saw in the Field

Throughout my career, I worked on projects where management faced problems that seemed impossible to solve.

These were not theoretical problems.

They were urgent, high-stakes issues involving:

budgeting
consolidation
reporting
collaboration
process control

Often the ERP systems could not solve them.

External consultants could not solve them.

The vendors promoting enterprise systems could not solve them.

Yet repeatedly, solutions emerged using Excel leveraging databases and enterprise architecture.

Solutions that were robust.

More flexible.

And dramatically cheaper.

In one case, after seeing such a solution in action, a CFO asked a simple question:

“Why then do companies like Cognos exist?”

The Budget Review Benchmark

So rather than argue endlessly on social media, I propose something better.

A public benchmark challenge.

The scenario is based on a very common real-world requirement:

The Budget Review Process

At month end, hundreds of budget holders must review their accounts and provide knowledgeable oversight of reported numbers.

This process requires:

collaborative participation
distributed responsibility
consolidated reporting
rapid 24-hour turnaround
human insight combined with system data

It is a problem that exists in almost every large organisation.

And it is precisely the type of enterprise requirement that planning systems claim to solve.

So let us test it.

Excel Fights Back

I am presenting a working benchmark solution.

Built with Excel.

Not Excel as a document.

But Excel as part of a hub-and-spoke enterprise architecture.

A collaborative system where hundreds of users, and their group managers, can review and interact with centralised data – before the reports are published.

Now the invitation is simple.

Any vendor claiming that Excel cannot do this is invited to demonstrate their solution against the same benchmark.

We will compare solutions on:

Ability to solve the problem
Time to implement
Cost
Flexibility
Training required
Ongoing maintenance and extension
Total cost of ownership
Ease of modification by the users themselves

Everything will be transparent.

Everything will be public.

Everything will be evaluated on a level playing field.

Not a Fight Against Excel Educators

Let me be absolutely clear.

This is not a challenge to the Excel education community.

Many educators are doing extraordinary work on personal productivity.

The issue is not Excel training.

The issue is misrepresentation of Excel’s enterprise capabilities by the Excel Replacement Industry.

A Public Showdown

For nearly thirty years the Excel replacement industry has promoted the idea that Excel is inadequate for enterprise work.

It is time to test that claim properly.

Not through marketing.

Not through white papers.

But through transparent demonstration.

The campaign is called: