A Simple Demonstration That Exposes the Excel Progress Paradox

By Hiran de Silva

In my previous article, The Excel Progress Paradox, I argued that something unusual has happened in the Excel world.

Historically, progress means that what comes next genuinely supersedes what came before.

New technologies replace old ones because:

• they work better
• scale better
• create better outcomes
• solve problems more effectively
• improve operational reality

That is how progress normally works in engineering, technology, manufacturing, transportation, communications — almost every field.

And critically, progress is usually validated by the market.

By the real users.

By the people whose responsibilities, risks and operational pressures are real.

But I argued that in the case of Excel, something different happened.

I argued that the social media era changed the mechanism by which “progress” is judged.

And now, instead of enterprise outcomes determining what is considered “better”…

visibility increasingly does.

This follow-up article provides a very simple example that demonstrates the problem clearly.

Budget consolidation.

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The Pushback

One of the obvious responses to my previous article is this:

“But surely modern Excel techniques became popular for a reason?”

And superficially, that sounds reasonable.

Search YouTube for:

• Excel consolidation
• budget consolidation
• consolidate spreadsheets
• Power Query consolidation

…and you will find thousands upon thousands of videos.

Millions of views.

A huge apparent consensus.

The message is overwhelming:

this is the modern way to consolidate spreadsheets.

And because it is so dominant socially, many people naturally assume that it therefore represents genuine technological progress.

But does it?

That is the real question.

And the answer depends entirely on who is doing the evaluating.

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Two Very Different Audiences

This is the crucial distinction.

The audience that dominates social media Excel is not the same audience that runs organisations.

Social media largely targets:

• beginners
• junior analysts
• learners
• feature enthusiasts
• aspiring Excel creators
• people with little operational responsibility
• people at the bottom of the organisational pyramid

That is not an insult.

It is simply how audience demographics work.

But the people who determine whether a budgeting process actually works in enterprise reality are:

• finance directors
• regional managers
• operational management
• executives
• senior finance teams
• top management

These are the people with skin in the game.

These are the people who experience the operational pain when processes fail.

And these are the people who ultimately decide whether something is an improvement or not.

Not YouTube.

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The Traditional Budgeting Problem

Let us start with the old world.

Historically, budgeting systems built with spreadsheets often relied on:

• external links
• chained workbooks
• copy-and-paste processes
• fragmented consolidation models

Messy.

Risky.

Prone to breaking.

Everybody in finance knows this.

And because these systems were fragile, there was naturally huge excitement when Power Query arrived and demonstrated that you could:

• place files into a folder
• import them automatically
• consolidate them
• analyse them via Pivot Tables

From a social media demonstration perspective, this looks fantastic.

And technically, yes — it works.

But now comes the important question:

what problem are we actually trying to solve?

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Budgeting Is Not a Consolidation Problem

This is where the misunderstanding begins.

Budgeting is not fundamentally a spreadsheet aggregation problem.

Budgeting is a collaborative management process.

And that changes everything.

Large budgeting cycles involve:

• negotiation
• iteration
• challenge
• revision
• approvals
• strategic alignment
• operational adjustment

Country managers negotiate with regional managers.

Regional managers negotiate with group management.

Departments revise plans continuously.

People need to:

• adjust assumptions
• see consequences
• revise targets
• compare scenarios
• collaborate live

This process is dynamic.

And critically:

it is real-time.

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What Power Query Quietly Destroys

Now let us introduce the “modern” Power Query consolidation model.

The moment this happens, the budgeting process fundamentally changes.

The organisation moves from:
a live collaborative environment

to:
a batch-processing environment.

Now somebody has to:

• run refreshes
• distribute updated workbooks
• manage consolidation timing
• coordinate versions
• administrate the process

The budgeting cycle becomes mediated.

Not live.

Not collaborative in real time.

And from management’s point of view, this is often completely unacceptable.

Because what management actually needs is:

• continuous visibility
• immediate feedback
• uninterrupted collaboration
• live consolidation
• preserved reporting formats
• unattended operation

Not periodic batch refreshes and Pivot Tables.

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The Pivot Table Problem

This is another area where social media demonstrations and enterprise reality diverge sharply.

Management generally does not want operational budget reports replaced by Pivot Tables.

Why?

Because management reporting is not merely data analysis.

It is communication.

Management reporting frameworks depend upon:

• consistency
• standard layouts
• familiar structures
• controlled presentation
• readability
• comparability
• organisational navigation

Pivot Tables may be technically powerful.

But that is not the same thing as being operationally appropriate.

And this distinction is rarely discussed in social media Excel culture.

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The Enterprise Solution Already Existed

Now comes the most important part.

Because there was already an enterprise solution to all of this.

Decades ago.

The real breakthrough was not Power Query.

The real breakthrough was:
client-server architecture.

Hub-and-spoke architecture.

Separating:

• the data
  from
• the spreadsheets.

This solved the actual enterprise problem.

Once the data became centralised:

• external links disappeared
• collaboration remained live
• reporting formats remained intact
• consolidations became dynamic
• users could work simultaneously
• management visibility improved
• processes scaled globally

And importantly:
the budgeting process remained a budgeting process.

Not a batch import exercise.

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So Why Did “Modern Excel” Win the Narrative?

Because social media rewards visibility.

Not enterprise architecture.

Power Query demonstrations:

• look modern
• demonstrate well
• create visual transformations
• produce instant “wow”
• fit short-form video formats
• appear approachable
• align with Microsoft marketing

In contrast, enterprise architecture:

• is harder to demonstrate
• requires systems thinking
• requires organisational understanding
• requires operational context
• often looks less visually exciting
• cannot easily be reduced to a 10-minute tutorial

So naturally, one dominates social media.

But that does not mean it supersedes the other in enterprise reality.

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Who Actually Gets to Decide?

This is the heart of the issue.

Who determines whether a budgeting methodology is genuinely better?

Social media?

Or management?

Because in real organisations, management votes every single day through:

• adoption
• rejection
• operational preference
• budget approval
• implementation success
• business outcomes

And when management sees:

• live collaborative budgeting
  versus
• batch-oriented spreadsheet consolidation

the answer is usually obvious.

One preserves and improves the operational process.

The other quietly breaks it.

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The Real Problem

Ultimately, this all comes down to one foundational issue.

Modern Excel culture still largely treats Excel as:
a document.

A standalone workbook.

A file passed between users.

But collaborative enterprise systems do not scale around documents.

They scale around shared data.

This was one of the great technological breakthroughs of the 1990s.

And according to the social media narrative, we somehow progressed beyond it.

But in many enterprise situations, what is called “Modern Excel” is not progress at all.

It is regression disguised as innovation.

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The Excel Progress Paradox

And this is why I called the original article The Excel Progress Paradox.

Because in almost every other field:
progress is validated through operational superiority.

But in the Excel social media era:
visibility itself increasingly creates the appearance of superiority.

That is the anomaly.

And budget consolidation demonstrates it perfectly.

Because if the real users — management, finance leadership, operational leadership — repeatedly reject the supposedly modern approach…

then perhaps the social media definition of progress is not the same thing as actual enterprise progress.

And perhaps the real question is no longer:

“What trends online?”

But instead:

“What actually works in the real world?”