By Hiran de Silva
There is a particular claim about Excel that has been repeated for so long that it appears to have acquired the status of fact.
Why are people still using Excel for consolidation when there are perfectly good specialist tools that can do it?
I recently heard essentially that argument made by a senior representative of an Excel replacement product during a panel discussion about the continuing relevance of Excel.
I am deliberately not naming either the person or the company here.
Because my purpose is not to attack an individual.
My purpose is to examine the claim.
And I want to do that by showing you something.
First, let us agree on the problem
Consolidation is enormously important in budgeting.
Imagine a global budgeting process involving:
400 operating units.
90 cities.
50 countries.
4 regions of the world.
There may be hundreds of people participating in the process.
And budgeting isn’t merely an exercise in adding numbers together.
It is a negotiation.
A manager wants another £10,000 in November because an important exhibition is taking place. Another manager in the same city needs another £5,000.
They are discussing this with their bosses.
Perhaps the shop managers are in Chennai. Their country manager is in Mumbai. Their regional manager could be in London.
They are all together in a Teams or Zoom meeting.
The first additional budget is agreed.
£10,000.
The second is agreed.
£5,000.
The two managers update their budgets.
Now comes an entirely reasonable question from the person responsible for Chennai:
What does that do to my consolidated budget?
And the person responsible for India asks:
What does it do to mine?
Good questions.
So let us answer them.
GET Chennai
From the Excel workbook, select Chennai.
Click GET.
There is the consolidated budget for Chennai.
Immediately.
Now select India.
Click GET.
There is the consolidated budget for India.
Immediately.
Everyone in the meeting can see the result.
Nobody has exported anything.
Nobody has emailed another spreadsheet.
Nobody has copied and pasted anything.
Nobody has waited for somebody in Finance to perform a consolidation.
And nobody has left Excel.
The two changes have been made at operating-unit level and their effect can immediately be seen at the levels above.
That is consolidation.
But it gets better.
Where did that number come from?
Suppose somebody in the meeting looks at the consolidated November figure for India and asks:
Are we sure about that number?
Excellent question.
Click the number.
Beside it appears the underlying detail making up the consolidation.
There are the operating units.
There are Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and the other locations.
And there, among them, are the two changes we have just made.
£10,000.
£5,000.
The consolidated figure is therefore not merely immediate.
It is verifiable.
It is auditable.
It is collaborative.
And it is live.
This is Excel.
So now I have a question
Let us return to the original proposition.
Why use Excel for consolidation when there are perfectly good specialist products designed for consolidation?
I am quite prepared to accept that there are.
There are excellent consolidation, planning and analysis products available.
That isn’t the issue.
My question is much simpler.
At what point in the meeting should we stop using Excel?
The two managers have just agreed their additional budgets.
They have updated them.
Everybody now wants to see the effect on Chennai and India.
So do we say:
“Excellent. That’s agreed. Now, if everybody could come back in three days’ time, we’ll put those numbers into another system, run the consolidation and send the results back to you.”
Why?
We already have the answer.
It is sitting in front of us.
This is the part of the Excel debate that troubles me
The problem isn’t that companies selling alternatives to Excel promote their products.
Of course they do.
The problem arises when a limitation is attributed to Excel which is not actually a limitation of Excel.
And when that claim is repeated often enough, it becomes part of the accepted narrative.
Excel is bad at consolidation.
Excel doesn’t scale.
Excel isn’t collaborative.
Excel cannot support enterprise processes.
Therefore, we need to replace Excel.
But there is an enormous missing question:
What architecture are you using with Excel?
Because the system I have just described is not a collection of isolated spreadsheets emailing numbers to one another.
The spreadsheets are clients.
The data is held centrally in a relational database — what I call the Digital Librarian.
The spreadsheets PUT information into that central store.
They GET information from it.
The database performs the central storage, control and retrieval.
Excel provides the working interface that business users already understand.
Suddenly the spreadsheet is no longer trapped within its traditional physical boundaries.
And many of the supposed limitations of Excel disappear with those boundaries.
And here is the extraordinary part
This isn’t some new capability introduced to Excel in 2026.
I was building solutions based on this principle approximately 30 years ago.
That is why I find the continuing debate so extraordinary.
We are still discussing whether Excel is capable of enterprise consolidation as though the only architecture available to us is a collection of disconnected workbooks.
It isn’t.
It hasn’t been for decades.
Liverpool is not Liverpool Street
I recently used another example to illustrate this wider problem of misinformation.
Liverpool and Liverpool Street sound similar.
But they are not the same place.
Liverpool is a major city in northwest England.
Liverpool Street is in London.
Confusing the two could lead to some spectacularly bad travel advice.
And if somebody points out the difference, that isn’t pedantry.
It matters.
I think something similar has happened in the Excel debate.
We have confused:
bad spreadsheet architecture
with:
the capabilities of Excel.
They are not the same thing.
Yet the distinction is rarely made.
And when somebody points it out, the response can sometimes be that this is too technical, too advanced or somehow outside what ordinary Excel users need to know.
I believe precisely the opposite.
The question Excel professionals should be asking
The Excel replacement industry has been making arguments about spreadsheet limitations for decades.
I understand why.
What I find much harder to understand is why the Excel community so rarely challenges those arguments by demonstrating the architecture that proves otherwise.
If Excel professionals, trainers, consultants and influencers do not show business leaders what Excel can actually do, who will?
So I am going to keep asking the question.
If somebody says Excel cannot perform enterprise-scale consolidation, I don’t want an argument.
I want a demonstration.
Here is mine.
400 operating units.
90 cities.
50 countries.
4 regions.
Live updates.
Immediate consolidation.
Global reach.
Drill-down.
Auditability.
Collaboration.
In Excel.
Now show me the limitation.
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