By Hiran de Silva
For the past few years I’ve been talking about what I call Global Excel.
Usually I explain it by comparing two fundamentally different ways of thinking about spreadsheets.
There is the Local Excel mindset, where a spreadsheet is viewed as a self-contained workbook. Everything happens inside that file. Formulas, reports, calculations, formatting, charts and automation all exist within the boundaries of a single workbook.
Then there is the Global Excel mindset, where Excel becomes part of a much larger information system. Workbooks are no longer isolated documents. They become intelligent clients connected to shared data, allowing collaboration, governance, auditing, security, workflow and real-time enterprise processes.
That comparison alone is interesting.
But recently I realised something much bigger.
Global Excel doesn’t simply offer another way of building spreadsheets.
It disrupts an entire industry.
A Curious Observation
Have you noticed who sponsors almost every major Excel event?
The Global Excel Summit.
FP&A conferences.
GenCFO.
Financial Modelling World Cup.
Microsoft Excel World Championship.
Look carefully at the sponsor lists.
Many of the biggest sponsors are not selling Excel training.
They are not selling formulas.
They are not selling PivotTables.
They are selling global spreadsheet solutions.
Anaplan.
Workday Adaptive Planning.
Planful.
DataRails.
Sheetcast.
Airrange.
And many others.
That immediately raises an interesting question.
Why are companies selling enterprise-wide planning and collaboration platforms sponsoring events whose presentations are almost entirely about things happening inside a single workbook?
Two Completely Different Conversations
Watch almost any Excel presentation.
The topics are familiar.
LET.
LAMBDA.
Power Query.
Dynamic Arrays.
Charts.
Conditional Formatting.
Power Pivot.
Office Scripts.
Python.
Copilot.
All fascinating subjects.
But notice something.
Almost every one of these presentations concerns Local Excel.
Everything happens inside one workbook.
Now compare that with the presentations given by the sponsors.
Their demonstrations rarely begin with formulas.
Instead they talk about entirely different problems.
Version control.
Collaboration.
Governance.
Security.
Audit trails.
Workflow.
Permissions.
Consolidation.
Scalability.
Multi-user access.
These are not formula problems.
They are architecture problems.
The Narrative
This is where the picture becomes much clearer.
The Excel replacement industry has become extremely good at demonstrating the limitations of Local Excel.
The examples are almost always the same.
Multiple copies of workbooks.
Different versions.
Email attachments.
Broken links.
Manual consolidations.
Disconnected processes.
No audit trail.
Poor governance.
Difficulty collaborating.
Most of us have seen these examples dozens of times.
Workday Adaptive Planning’s famous Nine Circles of Spreadsheet Hell is perhaps the best-known example, but many other vendors present remarkably similar lists of spreadsheet limitations.
These limitations are genuine.
But they all have one thing in common.
They assume spreadsheets are local.
The Missing Question
Very few people ever ask another question.
What if spreadsheets didn’t have to remain local?
What if the architecture changed instead?
What if Excel itself could deliver those same enterprise capabilities?
Not through an add-in.
Not through another subscription.
Not through replacing Excel.
Simply by using Excel differently.
That question changes everything.
The Real Competition
This leads to a rather surprising conclusion.
The Excel replacement industry isn’t really competing against Excel formulas.
It isn’t competing against PivotTables.
It isn’t competing against Dynamic Arrays.
It isn’t even competing against Excel itself.
It is competing against a different way of using Excel.
A way that very few people have ever been shown.
Enter Global Excel
This is where Global Excel becomes genuinely disruptive.
Global Excel demonstrates that many of the capabilities presented as reasons to move away from spreadsheets can, in fact, be achieved using native Excel running on ordinary Windows computers.
No proprietary spreadsheet engine.
No specialist platform.
No replacement technology.
Just Excel.
Designed differently.
The demonstrations are surprisingly simple.
Consider consolidation.
If you watch presentations from the enterprise planning industry, consolidation appears again and again as one of Excel’s major weaknesses.
The claim is familiar.
“Why struggle with spreadsheet consolidations when there are better technologies?”
So instead of arguing, I simply demonstrate.
Two budget figures are changed in two operating units in Chennai.
I click Get.
The Asia regional consolidation appears instantly.
No export.
No refresh cycle.
No overnight processing.
No waiting.
No manual consolidation step.
Then I drill straight through the regional total…
to India…
to Chennai…
to the individual shops…
to the exact values that were changed moments earlier.
All inside Excel.
That single demonstration immediately changes the conversation.
The Biggest Surprise
The most surprising part isn’t that it works.
The surprise is how simple it is.
People often assume there must be some extraordinary technology hidden underneath.
There isn’t.
The underlying ideas are remarkably straightforward.
Once someone understands the Global Excel mindset, many of the supposedly impossible problems become ordinary engineering.
That’s why I believe this is genuinely disruptive.
Not because it introduces new technology.
Because it reveals capabilities that have existed for years but remain largely unknown.
A Different Kind of Disruption
Most disruptive technologies replace existing technology.
Global Excel is different.
It doesn’t replace Excel.
It doesn’t replace enterprise architecture.
It changes our understanding of what Excel already is.
That is a much deeper disruption.
It calls into question decades of assumptions.
It challenges how Excel is taught.
How spreadsheets are evaluated.
How enterprise systems are marketed.
And how organisations decide when they need another platform.
The Conversation Has Changed
For years the debate has been framed like this:
Local Excel versus Enterprise Planning Software.
I believe that is the wrong comparison.
The real comparison is this:
Local Excel versus Global Excel.
Once that distinction becomes clear, many of the long-accepted arguments about spreadsheets begin to look very different.
Perhaps the most disruptive idea of all is this.
The enterprise capability that organisations have been told requires replacing Excel may, in many cases, already exist within Excel itself.
The challenge is no longer whether Excel can do it.
The challenge is whether we are willing to rethink what Excel actually is.
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