The Absurdity at the Heart of Excel Social Media
By Hiran de Silva
If you spend any time watching Excel content on YouTube or LinkedIn, you’ll notice a very common pattern.
The most successful Excel influencers often start their videos with a familiar phrase:
“Stop doing that. Do this instead.”
You see it everywhere.
- Stop using VLOOKUP — use XLOOKUP.
- Stop copying and pasting — use Power Query.
- Stop writing complex formulas — use dynamic arrays.
- Stop doing manual work — automate.
And to be clear — these creators are excellent educators.
People like Mynda Treacy, Leila Gharani, and Mark Proctor are outstanding at explaining Excel features. Their tutorials are clear, helpful, and incredibly valuable to millions of users.
Their message is also consistent:
Improve your personal productivity.
Learn shortcuts.
Automate repetitive tasks.
Get your work done faster.
That goal is completely legitimate.
But there is a huge elephant in the room.
And strangely, almost nobody talks about it.
The Elephant in the Room
All of this Excel education is built around one implicit assumption:
Excel is only a personal productivity tool.
Everything is focused on what happens inside the spreadsheet.
For example:
- Importing data into Excel
- Transforming data inside Excel
- Calculating results inside Excel
- Building dashboards inside Excel
The entire ecosystem revolves around optimising the workbook.
But this raises a question that almost nobody asks.
Is personal productivity the same as enterprise productivity?
The answer is no.
In fact, the two can sometimes be in direct conflict.
Personal Productivity vs Enterprise Productivity
Personal productivity focuses on making one user faster.
Enterprise productivity focuses on making the whole process work better.
Those are not the same thing.
For example:
| Personal Productivity | Enterprise Productivity |
|---|---|
| Import data into Excel | Keep data in a central system |
| Transform data locally | Manage data centrally |
| Build a better spreadsheet | Improve the business process |
| Work faster individually | Enable many people to collaborate |
One approach pulls data into the spreadsheet.
The other approach manages data outside the spreadsheet.
This difference is absolutely fundamental.
Yet it is rarely discussed.
Inside the Spreadsheet vs Outside the Spreadsheet
Almost all social media Excel content focuses on bringing data into Excel.
Copy-paste.
Power Query.
Shared workbooks.
But from an enterprise perspective, this raises a different question:
Why are we moving the data at all?
What if Excel were not the container of the data, but the interface to drive the data?
This is the difference between two completely different architectures.
The Popular Model
Excel as a self-contained document
Data → Spreadsheet → Analysis → Output
The Enterprise Model
Excel as a client to a central data system
Spreadsheet ↔ Database ↔ Business Process.
These are two-way flows of data.
This is what I call the difference between working inside the box and working in the real world of the business.
The Demonstrations
To make this difference clear, I use a portfolio of demonstrations.
Each example begins with the typical “inside the spreadsheet” challenge popular on social media, then reframes it as an enterprise process solution.
Examples include:
- Chairman’s CD Collection – managing shared information
- Travel Mates – collaborative, live decision model
- Friends Expenses – shared financial reconciliation
- Eurovision Scoreboard – real-time dashboards
- Global Excel Airbus – large-scale global seat booking architecture
- Beatles Jam Module – collaborative scheduling
Finance examples include:
- Annual Budgeting
- Budget Review
- Account Reconciliation
- REG Call Handler cascading selections (supply chain)
These examples all reveal the same pattern.
The moment you stop thinking of Excel as a document, and start thinking of it as a drive of shared data, the entire problem changes.
And surprisingly…
The solution often becomes simpler, not more complex.
The Budget Review Model
If there is one demonstration that illustrates this transformation most clearly, it is the Budget Review Model.
This model addresses a problem familiar to every finance department:
Budget holders reviewing their numbers. Before they are publiched.
Traditionally this becomes a nightmare of:
- Spreadsheet consolidation
- Version control
- Email chains
- Multiple conflicting files
But when the process is redesigned around shared data with Excel as the interface, the workflow becomes dramatically simpler.
The spreadsheet becomes a window into the process, not the container of the process.
For a CFO, the difference is enormous.
The Real “Stop Doing That”
So perhaps the real advice should be this:
Stop optimising personal productivity when the real opportunity is enterprise productivity.
Not because personal productivity is wrong.
But because the bigger opportunity is elsewhere.
Instead of asking:
“How can I automate my spreadsheet?”
Ask:
“How can I automate the business process?”
And the irony is this:
The second problem is often easier to solve.
And the rewards — professionally and financially — are far greater.
The Career Question
Imagine showing a CFO a solution to one of their biggest operational headaches.
Not by introducing an expensive enterprise system.
But by using a tool already installed on every machine in the company.
That moment can change a career.
It certainly changed mine.
And it began with one simple shift in thinking:
Stop automating spreadsheets.
Start automating the enterprise.
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