By Hiran de Silva
There is no shortage of Excel webinars.
Every week, somewhere in the world, somebody is demonstrating a new feature, a new formula, a new piece of technology, a new productivity trick, or a new way of doing something we have been doing for years.
And increasingly, there is another familiar format.
You register for the free webinar. You attend for an hour or perhaps ninety minutes. There is some useful content at the beginning. And then, somewhere along the way, the webinar turns into QVC.
Here is the problem.
Here is what you could achieve.
Here is the course.
Here is the special offer.
Here is the countdown clock.
My proposed Global Excel Happenings will be rather different.
There will be nothing to buy.
And that difference is much more important than it sounds.
Why There Is No Sales Pitch
I am not proposing these events as a mechanism for selling training.
Indeed, in the conventional sense, I am not even sure I would describe what happens as training.
My purpose is something different.
I want to make people aware of an opportunity to create value that, in my experience, is almost completely absent from the mainstream Excel conversation.
CFOs will be very welcome. In fact, I hope many CFOs attend.
But there is another audience I particularly want to reach.
It is the people who work for those CFOs.
The accountants, analysts, finance managers, systems accountants and Excel professionals who are in a position to make an extraordinary difference to the organisations in which they work.
I know that opportunity exists because it shaped my own career.
Several times in my career, I walked into an organisation to do what appeared to be relatively ordinary spreadsheet work. Within days, the nature of the assignment changed dramatically because of what Excel could be made to do.
And my value to the organisation changed with it.
There is an important lesson in that.
CFOs do not object to discovering that you are worth considerably more money when you have just discovered how to solve considerably more valuable problems.
That is the opportunity I want people to experience.
Not merely hear about.
Experience.
This Is Not a Talking-Head Webinar
That brings me to the second major difference.
These will be live, interactive events.
You will not simply watch me sharing a screen while several hundred muted participants sit anonymously in little rectangles.
You will have Excel open.
You will download the files.
You will use them.
You will press the buttons.
You will inspect the code.
But most importantly, you will participate in the process itself.
You may be interacting with dozens of other people attending the same event.
One person does something.
Somebody else sees the consequence.
Data moves.
The model changes.
The organisation represented by those spreadsheets begins to behave as an organisation.
And suddenly something that is very difficult to communicate in a PowerPoint slide becomes extraordinarily easy to understand.
Because you have just experienced it.
That may also mean deliberately limiting the number of participants. There is a practical difference between broadcasting information to 500 people and allowing 500 people simultaneously to interact with a live working system.
I am interested in the second.
There May Be No Replay
This may be one of the strangest aspects of the format.
I am currently inclined not to provide recordings of these events.
That isn’t artificial scarcity.
It is because a recording misses the point.
You can record somebody describing an experience.
You cannot record your experience of having it.
Imagine watching a recording of twenty people playing football. You have certainly recorded the football match.
But you haven’t bottled the experience of being one of the players.
That is the distinction I want to exploit.
The important thing will not be watching Hiran demonstrate something.
The important thing will be what happens on your own computer when you become part of the demonstration.
And afterwards, you won’t simply be left with a recording.
You can keep the model.
Continue experimenting with it.
Send a template to a colleague.
Ask them to join in.
Send one to your boss.
Press the switch.
And watch their expression.
In other words, the experience doesn’t necessarily end when the webinar ends.
Collaboration — But Perhaps Not as You Know It
We talk a great deal today about collaboration in Excel.
Usually, that means co-authoring.
Several people can work inside the same workbook.
Useful? Absolutely.
But there is another form of collaboration that receives remarkably little attention.
What if many people could work independently in their own spreadsheets while participating in the same business process?
What if one person’s spreadsheet could PUT information into a central resource and another person’s spreadsheet could GET precisely the information that person needs?
What if the spreadsheets themselves became clients of a common information system?
That is the world I want participants to experience.
It is also where we begin talking about something that has been sitting inside Excel for decades and yet remains astonishingly unfamiliar to much of today’s Excel community.
ADO.
And, importantly, we will also look at modern alternatives.
There are newer technologies. There are exciting technologies. There is plenty of hype surrounding them.
But there is an important distinction between a technology existing and a technology being deployable today across the environment in which your organisation actually operates.
That distinction matters enormously in the enterprise.
The Central Theme Will Be Contrast
In fact, if I had to choose one word to describe these events, it might be:
Contrast.
Because I think contrast is one of the best ways to learn.
Take a familiar Excel exercise.
Christmas expenses.
A personal budget.
A reconciliation.
A consolidation.
There is nothing wrong with demonstrating excellent techniques for solving those problems. I will happily refer to examples from people such as Oz du Soleil, Mark Proctor and others whose work provides useful illustrations of mainstream Excel thinking.
But now put something different beside it.
Instead of asking:
How can I perform this task more efficiently in my spreadsheet?
ask:
How should this entire process work across an organisation?
Those are not necessarily the same question.
And that distinction is fundamental.
Point-to-Point Versus Hub-and-Spoke
Much of the Excel knowledge available today teaches us increasingly sophisticated ways of moving information from Point A to Point B.
And then from Point B to Point C.
And C to D.
We become extremely good at point-to-point spreadsheet engineering.
Power Query can make that movement vastly more sophisticated.
Dynamic arrays can make it more elegant.
LAMBDA can make calculations reusable.
AI can help us construct it.
And yet, at enterprise scale, we can still end up with an extraordinarily sophisticated version of the same fundamental architecture.
Point to point to point to point.
Now compare that with hub-and-spoke.
Each spreadsheet communicates with a central information resource.
The spokes do not need to know about one another.
One spreadsheet PUTs.
Another GETs.
A hundred people can participate.
Or four hundred.
Or thousands.
Suddenly, the problem looks completely different.
And this is why merely teaching another Excel feature is not enough.
Learning to Think Sideways
Consider reconciliation.
I can show you two datasets and ask you to reconcile them.
The obvious response is to begin matching them.
Tick and bash.
Then automate the tick and bash.
Then make the automation cleverer.
Then perhaps use Power Query.
But suppose I ask another question.
Why do these two datasets need reconciling in the first place?
Now we are somewhere else entirely.
That is lateral thinking.
Creative thinking.
And I don’t think it can be taught simply by giving somebody another function to learn.
We learn it by seeing contrasting ways of looking at the same problem.
The conventional solution beside the alternative.
The local spreadsheet beside the global process.
The point-to-point architecture beside the hub-and-spoke architecture.
The feature beside the requirement.
And sometimes the most powerful lesson comes when the technically sophisticated solution suddenly looks unnecessary.
That is also the context behind my deliberately provocative argument that Power Query is dead — for a particular class of enterprise purpose.
Not because Power Query has ceased to work.
Not because ETL has ceased to matter.
But because once you change the architecture of the problem, the job you thought needed Power Query may disappear.
That is a very different proposition.
And the demonstration is the killer punch.
We Will Examine What the Industry Is Saying
These events will also engage directly with the conversation already happening around Excel.
That includes Excel practitioners and influencers.
It includes the software industry.
It includes commentators such as Jim Bell writing in The Wall Street Journal about CFO concerns over spreadsheets.
It includes the enormous industry that has grown around solving what are described as spreadsheet problems.
I don’t want to pretend that conversation doesn’t exist.
Quite the opposite.
I want to put it on the screen.
Here is the problem as commonly described.
Here is the proposed solution.
Now let us reproduce the underlying business requirement.
And now let us see what happens when we approach that requirement differently.
No personalities need to be attacked.
No work needs to be disparaged.
The contrast can speak for itself.
Indeed, that is precisely why live demonstration matters so much.
An argument can be disputed.
A claim can be countered.
A LinkedIn post can generate another LinkedIn post.
But if twenty people are sitting around the world with Excel open and the thing actually happens on their computers, we have moved from rhetoric to empirical evidence.
It either works or it doesn’t.
What Is Excel, Anyway?
Underneath all of this sits an even more fundamental question.
What exactly is Excel?
Most people’s mental picture of Excel is what they can see.
Rows.
Columns.
Worksheets.
Formulas.
Charts.
Tables.
Perhaps Power Query, PivotTables, dynamic arrays and VBA.
But Excel is not merely its visible interface.
Its capabilities reside in its object model and in the technologies with which those objects can interact.
And that includes things that most Excel users never see.
There is, in effect, another Excel hiding behind the Excel everybody knows.
It has been there for decades.
My own career became rather unusual when I stumbled through that door.
That story — including how I discovered it, what happened when I used it in real organisations, and why clients suddenly valued my work very differently — will form part of these events.
Not because I want everybody to copy my career.
But because I want people to recognise the opportunity that created it.
Come to Play, Not to Watch
So that is my proposed difference.
No product launch.
No 45-minute pitch at the end.
No carefully manufactured sales funnel.
Possibly no replay.
Instead:
Come with Excel.
Download the files.
Open them.
Inspect them.
Press the switch.
Interact with other people.
Break things.
Ask questions.
Compare approaches.
Take the model away.
Show your colleagues.
Show your CFO.
And most importantly, experience a capability of Excel that you may never previously have been shown.
Because I don’t particularly want you to leave saying:
That was an interesting webinar.
I would much rather you leave thinking:
Hang on.
If Excel can do that…
what could I do with it on Monday morning?
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