By Hiran de Silva
Throughout history, progress has usually followed a familiar pattern.
Something revolutionary appears.
It changes the game.
It becomes the accepted standard.
Then eventually… it is superseded.
Steam trains gave way to diesel and electric.
Horse-drawn transport gave way to motor vehicles.
Silent films gave way to sound.
Mainframes gave way to personal computers.
Civilisation moves forward because something genuinely better replaces what came before.
And importantly…
the market usually decides this through experience.
Not through slogans.
Not through marketing.
Not through popularity contests.
But through reality.
Through outcomes.
Through whether the new thing actually works better.
Which is why I believe something deeply unusual has happened in the world of Excel.
Because Excel appears to be one of the very few areas of technology where the accepted definition of “progress” may actually have detached itself from enterprise reality.
And social media is the reason.
The Professional Excel Era
To understand the problem, we need to go back.
Back before “Modern Excel.”
Back before social media influencers.
Back before virality became the dominant force shaping technical education.
In the 1990s, Excel underwent a series of monumental transformations.
In 1993, Excel 5 introduced a fully exposed object model together with VBA. Suddenly, spreadsheets were no longer just calculation documents. They became programmable systems.
Microsoft also introduced connectivity technologies that evolved rapidly throughout the 1990s:
- ODBC
- DAO
- ADO
- external database connectivity
- client-server architecture
- distributed data access
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Excel professionals could already build solutions that rivalled — and often exceeded — what ERP systems could deliver.
Not cosmetically.
Operationally.
This is important.
Because many people today seem unaware that Excel was already operating at enterprise scale 25–30 years ago.
Not theoretically.
Actually.
What Excel Professionals Were Already Doing
Around that time, I was implementing enterprise-grade solutions using Excel integrated with relational databases.
Budgeting systems.
Accounts review systems.
Bank reconciliation systems.
Audit support systems.
Global consolidation systems.
These were not toy examples.
These were real operational systems used by management.
In some cases, the solutions dramatically outperformed what internal IT departments believed was possible.
In one organisation, a senior manager successfully campaigned for a £2 million ERP replacement project because he argued that the advantages we had created using Excel “should really belong to IT.”
The final cost reportedly rose to around £6 million.
And still failed to deliver what the original Excel architecture had already achieved.
Eventually I was brought back at a higher consulting rate.
That experience taught me something very important.
The issue was never really Excel.
It was architecture.
Excel Was Already “Modern”
This is where things become interesting.
Today we hear terms like:
- Modern Excel
- Power Query
- Dynamic Arrays
- Python in Excel
- Copilot
- LAMBDA
- XLOOKUP
These are presented as though Excel has finally evolved into something powerful.
But from the perspective of enterprise architecture…
Excel was already powerful decades ago.
The revolutionary leap happened when Excel became:
- programmable
- connected
- distributed
- database-enabled
- globally scalable
That was the real breakthrough.
Not whether a lookup formula became more elegant.
Not whether a transformation step moved into a graphical interface.
The real revolution was that Excel became a front-end platform for enterprise systems.
And many professionals exploited that capability very successfully long before social media existed.
Then the Rules Changed
And this is the heart of the issue.
The problem is not that Excel improved.
The problem is that the rules for judging Excel changed.
Historically, technology was judged by:
- scalability
- flexibility
- operational value
- business outcomes
- cost efficiency
- leverage
- architecture
But once social media became dominant…
those criteria started to disappear.
The new criteria became:
- visibility
- virality
- simplicity of demonstration
- personality
- entertainment
- trend alignment
- algorithmic reach
This created an entirely different ecosystem.
And crucially…
the people dominating this ecosystem were often not enterprise Excel professionals.
They were social media professionals whose chosen topic happened to be Excel.
That is not the same thing.
Virality Is Not Engineering Proof
This is where the anomaly begins.
Because in most industries, inferior advances get rejected.
If a new aircraft design performs worse, airlines will not adopt it.
If a new train system reduces capacity, the market notices.
If a bridge design fails structurally, nobody cares how viral the engineer is on social media.
Reality intervenes.
But in the Excel world, something strange happened.
Visibility started replacing benchmarking.
And social proof started replacing engineering proof.
A technique could become “best practice” not because it produced the best enterprise outcomes…
…but because it:
- looked modern
- demonstrated well on YouTube
- matched trending terminology
- generated engagement
- aligned with Microsoft marketing
- was easy to consume in short-form content
That is a profound shift.
The Great Excel Progress Illusion
This is why I increasingly question the phrase “Modern Excel.”
Because it quietly assumes a very important thing:
that modern methods supersede what came before.
But has anyone really benchmarked that properly?
Take a real business challenge:
- annual budgeting
- budget review
- global consolidation
- accounts reconciliation
- distributed operational reporting
Now compare:
- enterprise Excel architecture from 25 years ago
against - today’s socially promoted “Modern Excel” approaches
What happens?
In many cases, the answer is startling.
The supposedly modern approach:
- becomes batch-oriented
- breaks collaborative workflows
- introduces unnecessary refresh cycles
- reduces responsiveness
- centralises control
- removes live interaction
- weakens operational agility
In other words…
what is marketed as progress may actually represent regression from an enterprise perspective.
The Three Stages of Pushback
I have noticed that when these issues are raised, the responses often follow a predictable pattern.
Stage 1:
“That can’t be done with Excel.”
Then the solution is demonstrated.
Stage 2:
“That’s not really Excel.”
Except the technologies involved have shipped with Excel for decades.
Stage 3:
“Only you can do it.”
Which is another way of saying:
“We never learned this.”
But none of these responses actually benchmark the outcome itself.
And that is the crucial point.
The Social Media Layer
The rise of social media changed technical education profoundly.
Today, success often depends more on:
- lighting
- presentation
- editing
- personality
- branding
- consistency
- audience retention
than on enterprise problem-solving capability.
That is simply the reality of the platform economics.
And once virality became the dominant reward system…
Excel content increasingly evolved toward what spreads best socially.
Not necessarily toward what delivers the greatest enterprise value.
That distinction matters enormously.
Because it explains why genuinely scalable enterprise techniques can become almost invisible online…
while non-scalable techniques accumulate millions of views.
The Benchmarking Question Nobody Wants to Ask
This is why benchmarking matters so much.
Not theoretical benchmarking.
Operational benchmarking.
Take:
- real business scenarios
- real scalability requirements
- real management workflows
- real collaborative pressures
- real time constraints
Then test the approaches.
Not on aesthetics.
Not on trendiness.
Not on popularity.
But on enterprise outcomes.
That is the missing conversation.
And it is astonishing how rarely it happens.
AI Makes This Even More Dangerous
Now AI has entered the picture.
And once again…
the risk is that virality overtakes reality.
Anything with “AI” attached to it trends instantly.
But the important question remains exactly the same as before:
Does it actually improve enterprise outcomes?
Or does it simply improve the visibility of the demonstration?
Those are not the same thing.
And they never were.
The Real Tragedy
The real tragedy is not that social media exists.
The tragedy is that an entire generation of Excel users may never discover what Excel was already capable of decades ago.
Because the dominant conversation no longer revolves around:
- architecture
- systems thinking
- enterprise leverage
- distributed workflows
- client-server design
- operational scalability
Instead, it revolves around:
- features
- demos
- trends
- influencers
- aesthetics
- engagement
That is not technological evolution.
That is a change in incentives.
And once the incentives changed…
the perception of progress changed too.
The Great Excel Progress Anomaly
This is the anomaly.
In almost every other field of engineering and technology, progress is validated through reality.
But in Excel…
progress increasingly appears to be validated through visibility.
And those are not remotely the same thing.
Which raises a deeply uncomfortable question:
What if “Modern Excel” is not actually the pinnacle of Excel capability at all?
What if it is simply the most socially visible version of Excel?
And what if some of the most powerful capabilities Excel ever developed…
were already there 25 years ago?
Add comment