The MVP Programme and the Rise of the Car-Park Driver
By Hiran de Silva
There is something fundamentally wrong with Excel education.
I have been writing about this for some time, because it is not one problem. It has many dimensions.
But one of the most important is the extraordinary transformation that has taken place in the Excel community itself.
And to understand that transformation, we need to go back about thirty years.
We need to go back to the world before YouTube.
Before LinkedIn.
Before the Excel influencer.
And, crucially, before owning a computer became ordinary.
Excel Was Once a Professional Tool in a Very Different World
When I first became involved with the online Excel community in the mid-1990s, Microsoft’s official discussion environment was on CompuServe.
Later came the Microsoft newsgroups.
But consider who was participating in those communities.
The economics of computing were completely different.
A serious laptop could represent an investment equivalent to many thousands of pounds in today’s money. Microsoft Office itself was expensive.
The people making those investments were therefore disproportionately people who could make serious money from the technology.
They were professional developers.
Consultants.
Power users.
People using Excel and the emerging desktop technologies to solve substantial business problems.
These were people such as Bob Umlas, Tom Ogilvie, Myrna Larson, Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey, John Green, Bill Manville, Charles Williams, Chip Pearson and many others.
They weren’t merely learning interesting Excel tricks.
They were solving problems.
And there is an enormous difference between the two.
I was part of that world myself.
I could justify investing heavily in computers and software because those tools allowed me to deliver enormously valuable business solutions.
At Edexcel, for example, the important question was never:
Which Excel feature should I use?
The question was:
What does this organisation need to achieve?
What is the bottleneck?
Where is the risk?
How does information need to move?
Who needs it?
When do they need it?
What happens next?
What happens three months from now?
That is a completely different way of thinking about Excel.
Then Computing Became Democratised
And this is where the story changes.
Hardware became dramatically cheaper.
Software became dramatically cheaper.
Internet access became ubiquitous.
Eventually we reached the world we inhabit today, where extraordinarily capable computers are commonplace and Microsoft 365 can be obtained for a modest monthly subscription.
That democratisation was unquestionably a good thing.
Millions upon millions of people gained access to technology that had previously been available to a relatively small professional population.
But it also changed the Excel audience.
The typical Excel user was no longer necessarily a professional developer or consultant looking at an organisation’s end-to-end processes.
Excel increasingly became an everyday workplace tool.
And that created an enormous new audience.
People doing their own piece of work.
Their own analysis.
Their own report.
Their own spreadsheet.
Their own job.
What I call working inside the box.
Then Came the Influencer
At roughly the same time, something else happened.
Social media created the influencer economy.
This had nothing particularly to do with Excel.
Influencers emerged in fashion, fitness, food, travel, technology, entertainment and practically every other field imaginable.
The economics were compelling.
Companies no longer had to rely exclusively on traditional advertising to reach enormous audiences.
Individuals could develop substantial followings of their own.
And inevitably, the Excel influencer emerged.
That changed the economics of Excel education.
The successful Excel educator increasingly became someone who could demonstrate something clearly and attractively to a large online audience.
A formula.
A chart.
A PivotTable.
Power Query.
Dynamic arrays.
XLOOKUP.
LAMBDA.
A clever shortcut.
A feature you didn’t know existed.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching any of those things.
The problem occurs when we begin to mistake that for Excel competence itself.
What Happened to the Professional Excel World?
It didn’t disappear.
This is extremely important.
The people building serious Excel-based business solutions didn’t suddenly stop doing it.
They carried on.
But there is a reason you don’t see much of their work on YouTube.
Professional consultants are frequently working under non-disclosure agreements.
Their intellectual property has commercial value.
Their clients frequently don’t want the world knowing about the processes being replaced or the problems being repaired.
Imagine telling a prospective client:
“Hire me to transform your financial processes, and afterwards I’ll make a YouTube video showing everybody how bad they used to be.”
That isn’t a particularly compelling consulting proposition.
So the professional Excel world became largely invisible.
Meanwhile, the visible Excel world exploded.
And visibility began to be confused with authority.
Enter the Microsoft MVP Programme
This is where the MVP programme becomes particularly interesting.
In the late 1990s, the people contributing heavily to the Microsoft newsgroups were often deeply involved in professional Excel development.
The MVP designation existed, but I don’t remember it being terribly important.
What mattered was whether somebody knew what they were talking about.
Over time, however, the environment changed.
Today’s most visible Excel experts are frequently content creators.
They are extremely good at explaining Excel.
They have excellent presentation skills.
They make polished videos.
They can demonstrate new product features beautifully.
And Microsoft’s interests naturally overlap with theirs.
Microsoft has new Excel functionality.
The influencer demonstrates it.
The audience learns about it.
Microsoft gains promotion.
The influencer gains content.
Everybody wins.
Except there is one enormous question that almost nobody seems to ask.
What happens outside the workbook?
The World According to Tim
Consider my fictional Excel user, Tim.
Tim has been taught modern Excel extremely well.
He has a beautifully structured table.
He uses Power Query.
His formulas are elegant.
Perhaps he uses dynamic arrays.
Perhaps he has mastered LAMBDA.
His workbook may be superb.
And then Tim emails it to somebody.
Another person makes a copy.
Another department produces another version.
Somebody consolidates several of them.
Someone else downloads another file.
Then another.
Then another.
And before long we have precisely the sprawling spreadsheet environment that the Excel-replacement industry has spent decades describing as:
Excel Hell.
And here is the extraordinary contradiction.
The replacement industry points at that mess and says:
“Look what happens when you use Excel.”
But from the perspective of a professional Excel developer, the response is:
Why were you designing the system that way in the first place?
That isn’t an inevitable property of Excel.
It is the consequence of an architectural choice.
The Missing Excel
This is why I find Microsoft’s own celebration of Excel’s history so revealing.
Look at the features we are encouraged to regard as milestones.
Excel Tables.
Power Query.
Dynamic arrays.
XLOOKUP.
LAMBDA.
Wonderful developments.
But where is database connectivity?
Where is ADO?
Where is the capability that allows Excel to operate as a client to a central relational database?
Where is the architecture that allows hundreds of spreadsheets to PUT their data into a central source and GET shared data back?
Where is the capability that allows Excel applications to participate in enterprise workflows rather than existing as isolated files?
That capability has existed for decades.
And yet it is almost invisible in mainstream Excel education.
This isn’t an obscure technical omission.
It changes the entire operating envelope of Excel.
The Car Park
Perhaps the easiest way to understand what has happened is to imagine that we taught people to drive cars in the same way that we teach Excel.
Imagine an enormous motoring education industry.
There are thousands of tutorials.
Millions of viewers.
Celebrity driving instructors.
Awards for the best driving educators.
Manufacturers enthusiastically supporting them.
But there is one peculiar feature of this entire educational system.
Nobody leaves the car park.
Inside the car park, you can teach an enormous amount.
Here is the steering wheel.
Here are the brakes.
Here is cruise control.
Look at this clever parking feature.
Did you know your mirrors could do this?
Here are ten things you didn’t know about your dashboard.
And all of that information can be perfectly correct.
You could become the world’s greatest expert on the features of the car.
But that does not make you an accomplished driver.
Because driving is not principally about the car.
Driving is about what happens outside the car.
Other vehicles.
Pedestrians.
Destinations.
Road networks.
Traffic.
Rules.
Risk.
Other people.
And most importantly:
Getting from where you are to where you need to be.
The destination shown on your satnav is not your destination.
It is merely a representation of your destination on a screen.
Your real destination exists somewhere outside the car.
Excel Has Its Public Highway Too
Exactly the same distinction applies to Excel.
The workbook is the car.
But businesses do not exist inside workbooks.
Customers don’t.
Suppliers don’t.
Other departments don’t.
Corporate databases don’t.
ERP systems don’t.
Management structures don’t.
Business processes don’t.
The rest of the organisation exists outside your spreadsheet.
Professional Excel competence therefore cannot simply mean knowing more things about what happens inside the workbook.
It must include understanding how that workbook participates in the wider system.
How does information arrive?
Where should it be stored?
Who else needs it?
Who owns it?
How do hundreds of people collaborate?
How is it audited?
How is it consolidated?
What happens when the organisation grows?
What happens next month?
What happens when Tim leaves?
Those aren’t obscure database questions.
They are professional spreadsheet questions.
So What Does “Excel Skills” Actually Mean?
Years ago, I asked people on LinkedIn what they understood by the expression Excel skills.
Almost everybody answered in terms of Excel features.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
We have allowed knowledge of the product to become synonymous with competence in applying the product.
They are not the same thing.
Knowing every control in a Boeing cockpit doesn’t make somebody a pilot.
Knowing every tool in a workshop doesn’t make somebody an engineer.
And knowing Power Query, LAMBDA, dynamic arrays, PivotTables, XLOOKUP and every other feature of modern Excel does not automatically make somebody competent at designing business systems with Excel.
Those things are useful.
Some are extraordinarily useful.
But they are ingredients.
They are not the meal.
Excel Education Is Broken
So when I say Excel education is broken, I am not saying that today’s Excel educators are bad at teaching Excel.
In many cases they are exceptionally good at what they do.
I am saying something rather different.
The definition of what it means to teach Excel has become too small.
We have built an enormous, sophisticated, highly polished educational ecosystem around the car park.
Microsoft supports it.
Influencers populate it.
Millions of users learn within it.
The MVP programme recognises many of its most successful contributors.
And meanwhile, an entire professional dimension of Excel—the dimension concerned with architecture, workflows, databases, collaboration, scale, organisational responsibility and end-to-end business processes—has largely disappeared from public view.
That is why the Excel-replacement industry can point at spreadsheet chaos and plausibly call it an Excel problem.
We have spent years teaching people everything about the car.
Perhaps it is time we taught them how to drive on the public highway.
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