By Hiran de Silva
There is an enormous amount of Excel education in the world.
YouTube is full of it.
LinkedIn is full of it.
There are courses, books, conferences, MVPs, trainers, influencers and communities devoted to helping people become better at Excel.
And much of it is excellent.
So why do I keep arguing that something important is missing?
Because almost all of this education is concentrated on one part of the Excel problem.
It teaches people how to become better at working inside their spreadsheet.
What it rarely teaches is what happens when that spreadsheet becomes part of a much larger business process.
That is the gap I am trying to fill.
Meet Tim
Tim works in an office.
Excel is an important part of his job.
He receives data from various places. Perhaps somebody emails him a spreadsheet. Perhaps he retrieves a file from a shared drive or SharePoint. Perhaps he downloads data from the ERP system or another corporate application.
Tim then does something useful with it.
He cleans it.
Transforms it.
Analyses it.
Adds formulas.
Builds a model.
Creates a PivotTable.
Produces a report.
And modern Excel education is extraordinarily good at helping Tim do all of this better.
Tim can learn Power Query.
Dynamic Arrays.
XLOOKUP.
Excel Tables.
LAMBDA functions.
Dashboards.
PivotTables.
Automation.
An enormous ecosystem has developed around making Tim faster, smarter and more productive.
That is a good thing.
But there is a problem.
Tim doesn’t work alone.
Tim’s Spreadsheet Has Somewhere to Go
Tim isn’t running a corner shop.
He works in a large organisation alongside hundreds or perhaps thousands of other people.
And in a real business process, Tim’s work rarely ends with Tim.
Something has to happen next.
Somebody else needs his numbers.
Another department needs his forecast.
His manager needs his report.
Finance needs his submission.
Another spreadsheet needs his data.
Eventually, somebody higher up the organisation needs all of these separate pieces consolidated into a bigger picture.
And this is where something strange happens.
We suddenly leave the world in which Excel education is extraordinarily sophisticated and enter a world in which the methods can be surprisingly primitive.
Tim emails his spreadsheet.
Someone saves another copy.
Someone changes it.
Another version is created.
Files are placed in shared folders.
More files are downloaded.
Numbers are copied from one spreadsheet into another.
Eventually somebody consolidates them.
And when two versions disagree, another business process appears:
reconciliation.
People have to work out why the numbers are different.
Meanwhile, management wants the consolidated position.
What does all of this mean for the department?
For the country?
For the region?
For the company?
So while we have become extraordinarily sophisticated at optimising what happens inside Tim’s box, the business process surrounding Tim’s box may remain fundamentally unchanged.
That is the paradox.
We Are Optimising the Wrong Unit
Imagine making Tim’s individual spreadsheet task 50 percent faster.
Excellent.
Now imagine that Tim’s spreadsheet is merely one stage in an end-to-end process involving 500 people, thousands of files, multiple consolidations, version-control problems, reconciliation and repeated manual intervention.
How significant was that 50 percent improvement?
This is the distinction that matters.
The unit of optimisation in popular Excel education is usually the individual spreadsheet user.
The unit of optimisation for senior management is the business process.
Those are not the same thing.
From Tim’s perspective, the question might be:
How can I consolidate these 50 files more efficiently?
From the CFO’s perspective, the better question may be:
Why are there 50 files that need to be gathered and consolidated in the first place?
That is a completely different level of Excel education.
The Missing Layer
This is the territory I have spent much of my professional life working in.
Not merely:
How do we make this workbook better?
But:
How should spreadsheets participate in an enterprise-wide business process?
How should hundreds of users submit information?
Where should that information live?
How should spreadsheets retrieve it?
How do we maintain one version of the truth?
How do we provide auditability?
How do we manage access rights?
How do we consolidate without collecting files?
How do we allow hundreds of spreadsheets to work independently while sharing the same central source of data?
How do we design Excel solutions that have scale, reach and collaboration?
These questions belong to a different world of Excel.
And remarkably little mainstream Excel education is devoted to them.
That is the gap.
This Is Not an Attack on Excel Educators
This distinction is important.
I am not arguing that the people teaching Tim are doing something wrong.
Quite the opposite.
They are often extremely good at what they do.
If somebody teaches Tim a better way to transform his data with Power Query, that may be enormously useful to Tim.
If somebody shows him how to replace a complicated collection of formulas with a Dynamic Array, excellent.
If somebody teaches him a clever LAMBDA function, terrific.
Keep doing it.
The problem arises only when we assume that making Tim better at Excel is the same thing as making the organisation better at Excel.
It isn’t.
They are two different problems.
And they require two different bodies of knowledge.
A conversation I had at the Global Excel Summit reinforced this distinction for me. I put the question to several prominent people in the Excel community, including Chandoo, Carlos Barboza and Leila Gharani. My recollection of the conversation with Leila was particularly encouraging: she immediately recognised that the territory I was describing served a different purpose and a different audience from mainstream Excel training.
Precisely.
There is room for both.
Power Query Is a Perfect Example
Power Query is an extraordinary tool.
But it also illustrates the distinction perfectly.
Extract, Transform and Load did not begin with Power Query.
ETL is a much older enterprise computing concept.
Organisations have extracted information from operational systems, transformed it and loaded it elsewhere for analysis and reporting for decades.
Power Query brought an extremely accessible version of that idea to the ordinary Excel user.
That was a tremendous achievement.
But look at where the data normally ends up.
Inside Tim’s environment.
That makes perfect sense when Tim is the target user.
Now change the question.
Suppose 500 Tims need to work with the information.
Suppose they also need to submit information.
Suppose the data needs to be available continuously.
Suppose spreadsheets in London, New York, Singapore and Sydney need access to the same information.
Suppose management wants consolidation in real time.
Now we have moved beyond Tim.
And the architecture needs to move with us.
This is where the relational database becomes important.
Instead of thinking only:
Source → Power Query → Workbook
we can think:
Sources → Central Data Resource → Many Excel Clients
And those Excel clients can both retrieve and submit information.
GET.
PUT.
That is the foundation of what I call the Digital Librarian.
The spreadsheet no longer has to be the place where the organisation’s information lives.
It becomes a client of the organisation’s information.
That is a profound change in thinking.
From Local Excel to Global Excel
This is ultimately the distinction I am trying to teach.
Most Excel education teaches Local Excel.
And we need Local Excel.
It teaches us to do extraordinary things inside a workbook.
But there is another world.
Global Excel.
Global Excel asks what happens when hundreds or thousands of spreadsheet users participate in the same business process.
It asks how Excel communicates.
How Excel collaborates.
How Excel shares data.
How Excel submits data.
How Excel retrieves data.
How Excel interacts with relational databases.
How Excel becomes a front end to centrally managed information.
How individual spreadsheets become spokes around a shared hub.
And crucially, how we can achieve all of this while still allowing people to use the tool they already know:
Excel.
Two Audiences. Two Perspectives.
This also explains why some of my demonstrations may look unusual compared with conventional Excel tutorials.
A conventional tutorial might demonstrate:
How to consolidate 50 workbooks with Power Query.
I am more interested in asking:
How do we design the process so that there aren’t 50 workbooks waiting to be consolidated?
A conventional tutorial might ask:
How do I make my workbook automatically update?
I might ask:
How can 400 managers independently retrieve the latest information from the same source?
A conventional tutorial might ask:
How do I create a searchable database in Excel?
I might ask:
How can thousands of employees search the same centrally maintained database through Excel?
Neither question invalidates the other.
They simply operate at different levels.
One looks from the desk outward.
The other looks from the boardroom downward.
The Excel Skills Pyramid Is Bigger Than We Think
This is why I increasingly believe our definition of “advanced Excel” needs reconsideration.
Advanced Excel is normally described as knowing increasingly sophisticated Excel features.
But there is another dimension.
A person might know relatively simple Excel techniques and yet understand how to deploy Excel across an organisation.
They understand architecture.
Data.
Business processes.
Databases.
Client-server principles.
Auditability.
Security.
Scalability.
Workflow.
Management information.
They know when the answer is not another formula.
Sometimes the most sophisticated Excel solution is technically very simple.
The sophistication lies in where Excel sits in the architecture.
That is the territory in which I have spent my career.
Filling the Gap
So yes, I am challenging parts of conventional Excel thinking.
I will continue to do so.
But the purpose is not to undermine the extraordinary amount of work being done by Excel educators.
It is to point towards the territory beyond it.
There are already enormous armies of talented people helping Tim become better inside his box.
I am interested in what happens when we open the box.
When Tim’s spreadsheet meets Sarah’s spreadsheet.
When Sarah’s spreadsheet meets Finance.
When Finance meets Operations.
When 100 budget holders become 1,000.
When London becomes global.
When the spreadsheet stops being considered an isolated file and starts becoming a client in an enterprise architecture.
That territory deserves an education system of its own.
Because the biggest opportunity for Excel professionals may no longer be learning one more clever thing to do inside a spreadsheet.
It may be learning how to take everything they already know…
and deploy it across the enterprise.
That is the gap I intend to fill.
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