The Biggest Opportunity in Excel May Be the One Nobody Is Teaching

By Hiran de Silva

There is something very strange about Excel education.

It becomes apparent when you compare two completely different demographics.

The first is the demography of people learning Excel.

The second is the demography of how Excel is actually used in business.

They are not the same.

In fact, I believe they are almost opposites.

And that mismatch may explain an extraordinary amount: why spreadsheet processes become unmanageable, why senior management becomes frustrated with Excel, why an enormous Excel-replacement industry exists—and, most importantly, why there is such an extraordinary career opportunity for the Excel professional who learns to operate differently.

Let me explain.

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Pyramid One: The Demography of Excel Education

Imagine a pyramid.

At the bottom is the largest population: ordinary spreadsheet users, beginners, relatively inexperienced users, people learning Excel and people wanting to become more productive at their own jobs.

As we move upwards, the population becomes smaller.

At the top are people carrying much greater organisational responsibility.

Managers.

Finance directors.

CFOs.

Senior executives.

The people with real skin in the game.

If something goes badly wrong with an enterprise budgeting process, the person entering numbers into one spreadsheet probably isn’t the person whose head rolls.

Somebody further up the pyramid carries that responsibility.

Now imagine you are an Excel social-media influencer.

Which part of this pyramid would you naturally address?

The answer is obvious.

The bottom.

There are vastly more people there.

They are easier to reach. They are actively looking for help. They are excited by learning something new. And they provide the likes, views, comments, subscriptions and engagement upon which social-media success depends.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

It is simply how the economics of social media works.

And the content naturally follows.

A five-, six- or seven-minute video demonstrating a formula, Power Query transformation, keyboard shortcut, dynamic-array technique or new Microsoft feature can be extremely successful.

Turn on the screen recorder.

Demonstrate something useful.

Show the before and after.

Publish.

That is an excellent way of serving a very large audience.

But there is a problem.

You Cannot Screen-Record an Architecture

The concerns at the top of the pyramid are different.

A CFO isn’t primarily interested in how cleverly somebody transformed a table.

The CFO is concerned with the end-to-end process.

How does information get from here to there?

How do 100 people work together?

How do we consolidate their submissions?

How do we know who changed something?

How do we control access?

How do we connect disconnected processes?

How do we change the organisation structure without rebuilding hundreds of spreadsheets?

How do we ensure that everybody is working from the same information?

How do we make the process scalable, auditable and manageable?

These aren’t primarily questions about Excel features.

They are questions about:

architecture, methodology, governance, process design, organisational responsibility and systems thinking.

And there is another difficulty.

You can’t demonstrate most of that simply by recording the Excel screen.

You can record a formula.

You can record a button being clicked.

You can record a Power Query refresh.

But how do you screen-record a philosophy?

How do you screen-record an architecture?

How do you screen-record the politics between Finance and IT?

How do you screen-record the organisational consequences of 400 people exchanging spreadsheets?

You can’t.

That requires a different kind of teaching—and a different kind of thinking.

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Tim Lives Inside the Box

This is where my mythical Excel user, Tim, becomes useful.

Tim is good at his job.

His boss gives him something to do. Tim opens Excel. He receives some CSV files, perhaps downloads something from the ERP system, receives spreadsheets from colleagues, does his work and sends the result onwards.

Within the boundaries of his responsibility, Tim may be extremely efficient.

That is his box.

But Tim doesn’t necessarily know what happens before the information reaches him.

Nor does he necessarily know what happens after he sends his spreadsheet onwards.

It is, as we say in Britain, beyond his pay grade.

Tim’s boss has a wider box.

Tim’s boss’s boss has a wider box still.

And eventually somebody near the top has responsibility for the entire end-to-end process.

That person doesn’t care terribly much whether Tim saved three minutes with a clever formula.

They care whether the whole process works.

That distinction is fundamental.

Because now we can look at our second demographic.

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The Real Demography of Excel in Business

Forget social media for a moment.

Walk into a real organisation and look at the spreadsheets.

There are certainly some genuinely standalone spreadsheets.

Perhaps somebody runs a small business and keeps an analytical workbook entirely for themselves.

Perhaps an engineer performs an isolated calculation.

Perhaps the chairman’s PA maintains a Christmas-card list, then goes away and buys the presents.

Nothing needs to flow onwards.

Nobody else needs to contribute.

Nothing needs consolidating.

There is no scale problem.

There is no reach problem.

There is no collaboration problem.

That is what I call a Local Spreadsheet.

One person.

One machine.

One self-contained purpose.

But now look around the average workplace.

How many spreadsheets arrived in your inbox today?

How many did you open from a shared location?

How many CSV files did you receive or download?

How many spreadsheets did you send to somebody else?

How many people did you copy?

There is a very simple test:

If the answer to any of those questions is greater than zero, there is a good chance your spreadsheet is not really standalone at all.

It is part of a larger collaborative business process.

You may not see the process.

But your boss does.

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Now Draw a Pie Chart

Imagine a pie chart representing spreadsheet activity inside organisations.

One slice represents genuinely standalone, local spreadsheet activity.

The rest represents spreadsheets participating in some kind of collaborative business process.

I would contend that the standalone slice is the small one.

You don’t have to take my word for it.

Look around your own organisation and perform the test above.

Now compare that pie chart with our social-media pyramid.

And suddenly something extraordinary becomes visible.

The overwhelming majority of Excel education is aimed at the individual spreadsheet user.

Yet much of the serious spreadsheet activity inside organisations occurs as part of collaborative processes.

That is the mismatch.

And it matters enormously.

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We Teach Local Excel and Deploy It Globally

This, in my view, is one of the great unrecognised problems in Excel.

People learn techniques appropriate to a person working on a spreadsheet.

Then they take those techniques into an organisation and attempt to scale them.

Tim builds his spreadsheet.

Tina builds hers.

Ted builds another.

Todd builds another.

They exchange files.

They email attachments.

They place files on shared drives.

They download extracts.

They copy and paste.

They consolidate.

They create links.

Soon we have hundreds of individually competent spreadsheet users participating in something that, from above, looks like spaghetti.

That is point-to-point architecture.

And then the complaints begin.

Excel doesn’t scale.

Excel doesn’t collaborate.

Excel can’t provide proper governance.

Excel can’t manage access rights.

Excel can’t provide an audit trail.

Excel creates disconnected processes.

Excel creates multiple versions of the truth.

Excel is the problem.

But is Excel really the problem?

Or have we taken techniques designed for the small standalone slice of our pie chart and used them to construct the enormous collaborative part?

That is a completely different proposition.

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Popular Excel and Professional Excel Are Not the Same Thing

This also explains something I have been arguing for some time.

We tend to measure Excel competence by product knowledge.

Do you know Power Query?

DAX?

Dynamic arrays?

LAMBDA?

PivotTables?

Keyboard shortcuts?

Those can all be valuable skills.

But they don’t necessarily tell us whether somebody can design an enterprise spreadsheet process.

That requires another dimension of competence.

Can you take 100 disconnected spreadsheet users and make them operate as one coherent system?

Can you provide scale?

Reach?

Collaboration?

Consolidation?

Governance?

Access rights?

Audit trail?

Can you separate the data from the individual spreadsheet and create a structured architecture through which everybody participates in the same process?

That is a very different test.

And that brings me to Mission Impossible.

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Excel: Mission Impossible

I created the Mission Impossible series for a very specific reason.

Take a familiar Excel technique or business problem.

Not something obscure.

Take something taught by leading Excel educators and watched by hundreds of thousands—or millions—of people.

Then change one thing.

Scale it.

Instead of one person, make it 100.

Instead of one spreadsheet, make it 400.

Instead of one department, make it an organisation.

Now require:

scale,

reach,

collaboration,

consolidation,

governance,

security,

auditability,

and end-to-end process control.

Then ask:

How would you solve it?

Suddenly the problem changes.

The techniques that looked so impressive inside the standalone spreadsheet begin to struggle.

Not because those techniques are bad.

They were simply designed to solve a different class of problem.

The Mission Impossible exercise exposes the boundary.

And once you understand the boundary, something much more interesting becomes possible.

You can learn how to cross it.

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And This Is Where the Money Is

For the Excel professional, this isn’t merely an academic distinction.

It is potentially a career-changing one.

You can spend years becoming faster and cleverer inside Tim’s box.

That can make you extremely good at your job.

But organisations don’t necessarily pay dramatically more because somebody can perform the same task faster.

The large rewards come when you solve problems that matter to the people carrying responsibility for the entire process.

I discovered this accidentally around 30 years ago.

I was on a temporary assignment.

I built something that addressed a problem considerably larger than the job I had been hired to perform.

At the end of my six-week assignment, the client effectively said:

Stay.

Do whatever you like.

Find problems and solve them.

And my rate tripled.

That wasn’t because I suddenly became three times better at Excel formulas.

It was because I had crossed from doing spreadsheet work to creating organisational value.

And that pattern subsequently repeated itself.

It eventually led to what Wired described as my “six-figure spreadsheets.”

The interesting thing is that the underlying technical concepts weren’t necessarily more complicated than the fashionable advanced Excel techniques being taught today.

The difference was where they were applied.

They addressed the problems at the top of the pyramid.

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The Missing Excel Curriculum

That is why I believe there is an enormous gap in Excel education.

We have an extraordinary education ecosystem teaching people how to use the product.

Some of the educators in that ecosystem are superb.

That isn’t the criticism.

The problem is that there is another curriculum which is barely visible.

It begins when we stop asking:

How can I make my spreadsheet better?

and start asking:

How should spreadsheets participate in this business process?

That question changes everything.

It changes the architecture.

It changes where the data belongs.

It changes how people collaborate.

It changes what “advanced Excel” actually means.

And, most importantly for the Excel professional, it changes the value of what you can offer an organisation.

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Try the Gordon Ramsay Experiment

There is a very simple way to test this proposition.

I call it the Gordon Ramsay Experiment.

It originated from a real recruitment problem.

A client wanted people capable of thinking at this broader level but didn’t know how to describe the skill to recruitment agencies.

So I created a tiny process-design challenge.

It takes about five minutes.

You don’t need to build anything.

You don’t need advanced formulas.

You don’t need Power Query.

For perhaps 30 seconds, you simply have to think.

When I have used versions of this exercise, the overwhelming majority approach the problem one way.

Their solution works.

But it is manual, cumbersome and difficult to scale.

Then there is another solution.

The entire operational process effectively comes down to three clicks.

Put the two approaches in front of a business leader and ask:

Which person would you hire?

The answer is rather predictable.

Then put the same alternatives in front of Excel candidates and ask:

If you were the boss, which person would you hire?

Again, the answer is predictable.

Everyone wants the person who can see the bigger picture.

The difficulty is finding them.

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Which Demographic Are You Preparing Yourself For?

That, ultimately, is the question.

If you enjoy learning Excel techniques, there has never been a better time.

There is magnificent content available.

But if your ambition is to move upwards professionally, another question becomes much more important:

Whose problems are you learning to solve?

The problems of the enormous audience at the bottom of the social-media pyramid?

Or the problems of the much smaller group at the top of the organisational pyramid—the people carrying responsibility for scale, governance, collaboration, consolidation and the end-to-end process?

Because here lies the paradox.

The smaller audience may represent the bigger opportunity.

There is already an enormous industry competing to teach Tim how to become better inside his box.

Far fewer people are teaching Tim how to see beyond it.

And almost nobody is showing him how to transform the entire process once he does.

That is the gap.

That is what my Global Excel, Digital Librarian and Mission Impossible work is intended to address.

And for the ambitious Excel professional, I believe that gap represents one of the biggest opportunities in Excel today.

Don’t merely learn how to operate Excel.

Learn how to solve the problems of the people who ultimately decide what your Excel skills are worth.

I deliberately made the two demographic models the spine of the article, because I think that is the genuinely new idea in this piece: the social-media pyramid explains why education concentrates where it does, while the business-use pie chart exposes why that concentration leaves such a large professional gap. Your transcript then naturally turns that gap into the Mission Impossible proposition and, finally, the pay/career argument.