When the film set starts lecturing the real operating theatre about how surgery should be performed.
By Hiran de Silva
Twenty years ago, I nearly died.
I was on holiday in Sri Lanka when I was told that I urgently needed open-heart surgery. I had four blocked coronary arteries. Without surgical intervention, my future was looking decidedly uncertain.
Fortunately, through a remarkable series of connections, I found myself in the care of an exceptional cardiac surgical team.
The operation was led by an Indian cardiac surgeon, Dr. Kesava Dev, who had been brought to Sri Lanka to provide specialist surgical expertise. The country had developed facilities capable of treating visiting dignitaries who might require emergency cardiac care.
I wasn’t a dignitary.
But I was fortunate enough to have access to those facilities. My mother privately financed the operation.
The surgery was successful.
I am alive today because a team of highly trained medical professionals knew precisely what they were doing.
Their expertise was real. Their operating theatre was real. Their patient was real.
And the consequences of getting something wrong would have been very real indeed.
Now, let me introduce another famous medical professional.
George Clooney.
You have almost certainly heard of him.
You may never have heard of the surgeon who saved my life, but you have almost certainly heard of George Clooney.
Clooney achieved enormous fame playing Dr. Doug Ross in the television series ER.
He became a Hollywood superstar.
Millions watched him working in an emergency department, surrounded by medical equipment, nurses, doctors, and patients.
There were medical emergencies. There were life-and-death decisions. There were operating theatres.
There was drama.
And George Clooney was brilliant.
But there is one rather important distinction.
George Clooney was acting.
He wasn’t saving lives.
He was playing somebody who saved lives.
His extraordinary success was a testament to his abilities as an actor, not to his abilities as a surgeon.
And I would like you to keep that distinction firmly in mind.
Because I am about to suggest that a substantial part of today’s Excel education industry has lost sight of precisely this distinction.
And worse still, some of its participants appear to have become so immersed in their own theatrical world that they are now passing judgement on the real world for not behaving like their television drama.
That is where the absurdity begins.
1. Doctor, the Operating Theatre Is Ready!
Imagine the following scene.
Dr. Kesavade arrives at the hospital.
He has been informed that a patient urgently requires open-heart surgery.
He has reviewed the medical evidence. His team has been assembled. The necessary preparations have been made.
He enters the operating theatre.
And something is terribly wrong.
There are enormous studio lights suspended from the ceiling.
There are cameras everywhere.
A director is sitting in a chair.
A sound engineer is holding a boom microphone.
A script supervisor is checking the dialogue.
And on the operating table is a rubber dummy.
“What’s going on here?” asks the surgeon.
“Everything is ready, Doctor!” replies the production assistant.
“Ready for what?”
“To shoot the next episode of ER, of course!”
“But I have a patient whose life needs saving!”
“Yes, Doctor. We understand. That’s what the script says.”
“No! You don’t understand! This isn’t a television production. There is a real patient waiting for surgery!”
The director looks irritated.
“Doctor, you’re being unnecessarily confrontational.”
The producer intervenes.
“Why are you criticising our work? We have millions of viewers. Our actors are enormously popular. Our production values are exceptional.”
The surgeon is bewildered.
“But nobody here is actually performing surgery!”
“That’s a rather negative attitude, Doctor.”
“Do you even understand the difference between acting and surgery?”
And at that point, the surgeon is escorted off the set.
Perhaps he is blocked from commenting on the production company’s social media page.
After all, who wants an actual surgeon spoiling the entertainment?
Welcome to the modern Excel industry.
2. The World I Came From
About thirty years ago, I began working as an Excel consultant.
But I didn’t enter that profession from a background of making spreadsheets look attractive.
I came from a decade of senior financial management, including CFO-level responsibilities and experience in the boardroom.
Before that, I had studied engineering at University College London and trained in accountancy with firms that subsequently became part of Deloitte.
I was also deeply interested in the emerging capabilities of computers, spreadsheets, databases, and programming.
That combination was important.
Because when I entered a boardroom as a consultant, I understood the problems facing the people sitting around the table.
I understood their business responsibilities.
I understood financial controls, management reporting, budgeting, consolidation, transaction processing, and the consequences of unreliable information.
And I could demonstrate how emerging spreadsheet technology could solve those problems.
Not merely by talking about it.
By building working prototypes.
By showing the actual business process functioning.
By demonstrating what would happen when hundreds of people needed to collaborate, when thousands of transactions needed processing, or when management needed reliable information across an entire organisation.
I wasn’t there to entertain an audience.
I was there to solve a problem.
And I was being paid to produce results.
The distinction matters.
In those days, a serious professional laptop could cost the equivalent of £10,000 in today’s money.
The people working with these technologies professionally were operating in a very different economic and technical environment.
The capabilities they developed were enormously valuable.
In my own consulting career, four organisations increased my remuneration by at least three times within days of seeing what I could deliver.
Not because I demonstrated an impressive formula.
But because I demonstrated solutions to expensive business problems.
That was the real operating theatre.
And it still exists.
The problem is that much of the public conversation about Excel now takes place somewhere else entirely.
On the film set.
3. When Excel Becomes a Prop
Let me be absolutely clear.
I have no objection whatsoever to entertainment.
I have no objection to educational videos, tutorials, demonstrations, or people earning money from producing them.
George Clooney is an outstanding actor.
He deserves his fame and success.
The producers of ER created an enormously successful entertainment product.
Wonderful.
But suppose George Clooney began insisting that his experience playing a doctor qualified him to advise actual cardiac surgeons on how to perform bypass surgery.
Suppose he told them their techniques were outdated.
Suppose he announced that the operating theatre was becoming obsolete because modern television production could simulate surgery so convincingly.
And suppose that when an actual surgeon explained the difference, George Clooney blocked him.
We would recognise the absurdity immediately.
Yet something remarkably similar is happening in the Excel world.
Excel has become a prop in a vast social media content industry.
The objective of that industry is frequently to produce content that attracts attention.
Views.
Likes.
Subscribers.
Followers.
Engagement.
Commercial opportunities.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
But these are not the same objectives as those of a professional who must deliver a working business solution.
The film producer is trying to make a successful film. The surgeon is trying to save a life.
The same physical environment can be represented in both activities.
The objectives are entirely different.
And therefore the criteria for success are entirely different.
A demonstration can be entertaining, ingenious, technically impressive, and commercially successful.
And still be an inappropriate way of solving the business problem it purports to address.
This distinction is fundamental.
Yet how often is it explained?
4. The Power Query Hammer That Nobody Has Heard Of
Consider a recent example.
I was alerted to a tutorial demonstrating how Power Query could be used to perform CRUD operations.
CRUD means Create, Read, Update, and Delete.
These are fundamental operations involved in maintaining data.
Now, Power Query is primarily an extraction, transformation, and loading technology.
An ETL tool.
There may be circumstances in which someone devises an ingenious technique using Power Query to achieve something resembling CRUD functionality.
Fine.
I applaud ingenuity.
But surely the first question should be:
Why are we using an ETL tool to perform operations for which database management systems have been designed for decades?
What problem are we solving?
What alternatives exist?
What constraints make this particular approach appropriate?
What happens when the solution needs to support multiple users, permissions, audit trails, and concurrent transactions?
These are perfectly ordinary professional questions.
Yet in much of the tutorial world, the conversation begins and ends with:
“Look what you can do with Power Query!”
It’s like demonstrating how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood using the heel of your shoe.
Very clever.
You can do it.
If you haven’t got a hammer, it may even be useful.
But imagine a training course devoted to hammering nails with shoes.
Different shoes.
Different heels.
Advanced shoe-hammering techniques.
Ten amazing ways to drive nails with footwear!
And nobody ever mentions that hammers exist.
Then somebody enters the conversation and asks:
“Why not use a hammer?”
And the response is:
“Why are you being so negative?”
“Why are you always criticising other people’s work?”
“Why can’t you just appreciate the ingenuity?”
Because, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a course in carpentry.
It is a television programme about shoes.
Once you understand that, everything makes sense.
But what if the audience believes it is learning carpentry?
That is where the problem begins.
5. Cristiano Ronaldo Doesn’t Want to See Your LAMBDA Function
Here is another example.
Imagine a group of famous footballers getting together for a series of dinners.
One person pays for a meal.
Others attend.
Different participants agree to contribute different amounts.
At the end of the project, everyone wants to settle their accounts.
Who owes whom?
How much?
Why?
This is a familiar business problem.
It involves transactions, contributions, balances, and settlements.
The principles involved have existed for hundreds of years.
You record what each person has paid.
You record what each person has agreed to contribute.
You calculate the difference.
And you explain the resulting balance.
Simple.
Now imagine Cristiano Ronaldo receives a statement showing that he owes a certain amount.
He asks:
“Why do I owe this?”
And somebody presents him with a spectacular Excel formula.
A combination of dynamic arrays, LET, LAMBDA, FILTER, and several other functions.
A magnificent technical construction.
Possibly worthy of a million YouTube views.
But Ronaldo asks again:
“Yes, but why do I owe this money?”
And the presenter starts explaining the formula.
Ronaldo isn’t interested.
He wants to know which dinners he attended, what he agreed to contribute, what he has already paid, and what remains outstanding.
Show him those transactions and he can understand the result.
He can verify it.
He can agree with it.
And he can settle the balance.
The purpose of the spreadsheet is not to impress Ronaldo with Excel. It is to explain Ronaldo’s financial position.
That is the difference between a professional business solution and a formula demonstration.
On the film set, the complexity of the formula might be the star of the show.
In the real world, the complexity may be entirely irrelevant.
Or worse, an obstacle to the solution being understood and trusted.
A professional should know the difference.
6. An Airplane Is Not an Airport
Recently, Paul Barnhurst raised the subject of Excel acquiring database capabilities and speculated about the future of separate database technologies.
I challenged the underlying conceptual confusion.
I used an analogy.
An airplane and an airport have several things in common.
Both have seats.
Both have windows.
Both have toilets.
Both accommodate passengers.
But that doesn’t mean they perform the same function.
An airplane transports passengers.
An airport is a hub that facilitates journeys involving many airplanes.
Now imagine putting the airport inside the airplane.
Absurd?
Of course.
But this illustrates the distinction between a spreadsheet acting as a client and a relational database acting as a central hub.
Think of the passengers as data.
Think of the airplanes as spreadsheets.
Think of the airport as the central relational database.
The database serves multiple spreadsheets, multiple users, multiple business processes, and potentially an entire enterprise.
The spreadsheets retrieve and update information through that hub.
The system can support centrally controlled information, permissions, audit trails, and consistent business rules.
This is the architecture I have been deploying for decades.
It isn’t science fiction.
It isn’t a theoretical future capability.
It is established technology.
And Excel has had the means to participate in this architecture for a very long time.
Now, of course, Excel can contain tables of data. Power Pivot can maintain analytical data models. Excel can even provide interfaces to databases.
But that does not make all these things equivalent.
They have different purposes.
Just as airplanes and airports do.
I contributed this explanation to the discussion.
My comment was removed from the conversation when I was blocked.
Now, I cannot know precisely why that happened.
But the larger question is worth asking.
Why should an explanation based on decades of professional experience be unwelcome in a discussion specifically about database technology?
Would you invite an experienced cardiac surgeon to comment on surgical practice and then exclude him because he explained something that contradicted the television script?
That is the question.
7. How to Cross Abbey Road — Without Crossing Abbey Road
Let me give you another illustration of how absurd this can become.
Suppose you are standing on one side of Abbey Road in London.
You want to get to the other side.
There is a zebra crossing.
The very crossing made famous by the Beatles.
You could simply walk across it.
But imagine an Excel influencer announcing a revolutionary new technique.
“Today I’m going to show you an AMAZING way to cross Abbey Road!”
First, you order an Uber.
The driver collects you, performs a U-turn, and drops you on the other side.
Wonderful!
Another tutorial offers a more sophisticated solution.
Take a bus to Finchley Road.
Transfer to the Underground.
Travel back towards St John’s Wood.
Then walk to your destination.
A third tutorial introduces the ultimate game changer.
A helicopter!
Travel to a suitable landing site, board the helicopter, fly across London, land somewhere else, and make your way back to the opposite side of Abbey Road.
Absolutely spectacular.
The video attracts hundreds of thousands of views.
The presenter becomes a celebrity.
The comments are ecstatic.
“Brilliant!”
“Game changer!”
“I never knew you could do that!”
Then somebody asks:
“Why not just walk across the zebra crossing?”
Silence.
Then indignation.
“Why are you always criticising innovative solutions?”
“Why can’t you appreciate the effort that went into this tutorial?”
“Why are you attacking the presenter?”
And finally:
Blocked.
Now here is the crucial point.
Walking across the zebra crossing is not a competing innovation.
It is the normal, established solution.
It already existed.
The burden of explanation therefore belongs to the person proposing the helicopter.
Not to the person pointing out the zebra crossing.
If you have a compelling reason to use a helicopter, tell us.
Perhaps the crossing is closed.
Perhaps there is some extraordinary circumstance.
Fine.
Explain it.
But don’t present the helicopter as the natural solution while withholding the existence of the crossing.
And certainly don’t accuse somebody of being hostile because they point it out.
8. The Most Disturbing Part: When Fantasy Starts Judging Reality
Now we come to the central issue.
And this is where the story becomes more than a criticism of Excel tutorials.
It becomes a question about how people distinguish reality from fantasy.
There is nothing wrong with George Clooney playing a surgeon.
There is nothing wrong with an actor wearing a white coat.
There is nothing wrong with creating a convincing operating theatre on a film set.
There is nothing wrong with people enjoying the performance.
The problem begins when somebody forgets that it is a performance.
And an even more serious problem begins when that person starts passing judgement on actual surgeons because their professional practices don’t conform to the television script.
Think about the extraordinary reversal that has taken place.
The real-world professional is no longer being judged by whether his solution works.
He is being judged by whether his explanation fits the expectations of the entertainment environment.
Is it sufficiently fashionable?
Does it use the latest popular functions?
Does it fit the accepted narrative?
Is it positive enough?
Does it make the content creator look good?
Does it avoid challenging the audience’s existing beliefs?
And if it doesn’t, the professional becomes the problem.
Not the misconception.
Not the missing technical context.
Not the failure to distinguish a demonstration from a deployable business solution.
The professional who points out the distinction.
This is an inversion of reality.
It is as though the director of ER were to reprimand my cardiac surgeon for failing to make his operation sufficiently dramatic.
“Doctor, where is the suspense?”
“Why aren’t you delivering the dialogue?”
“Why aren’t you following the script?”
“Why aren’t you giving the audience something exciting?”
And the surgeon replies:
“Because I am trying to save this man’s life!”
To which the director responds:
“You’re being unnecessarily aggressive.”
Absurd?
Yes.
But consider how often technical discussions on social media are diverted away from the substance of the problem and towards the tone or perceived motives of the person challenging the demonstration.
That is precisely the phenomenon I am highlighting.
9. When Criticism of the Film Becomes an Attack on the Actor
I have encountered this attitude in exchanges with people including Giles Male and Wyn Hopkins.
My attempts to draw attention to the difference between personal spreadsheet techniques and enterprise spreadsheet architecture have sometimes been characterised as unnecessarily critical, provocative, or hostile.
But consider what I am actually saying.
I am not suggesting that people should stop making videos.
I am not suggesting that popular Excel functions have no value.
I am not suggesting that technical ingenuity is undesirable.
I am asking something much more fundamental.
What is the business problem, and why is this the appropriate way to solve it?
If somebody demonstrates a sophisticated Power Query technique for solving a problem that can be addressed more directly using established transaction-processing principles, why shouldn’t that distinction be explained?
If somebody promotes workbook-based techniques for maintaining shared data, why shouldn’t the audience be told that relational databases exist?
If somebody suggests that the evolution of Excel makes database systems redundant, why shouldn’t an experienced practitioner explain the architectural difference?
These are not personal attacks.
They are questions about professional competence, appropriate technology, and the accuracy of the information being taught.
Of course, content creators may genuinely believe their techniques are the best available.
They may simply be unfamiliar with alternatives.
Or they may understand the distinction perfectly well and choose a particular technique because it makes an interesting demonstration.
I cannot know which explanation applies to any individual.
But the distinction should be disclosed.
Because an audience that comes to learn how to solve business problems deserves to know whether it is watching an example of established professional practice or a demonstration of what can be made to work under carefully controlled conditions.
Those are not the same thing.
And confusing them has consequences.
10. Celebrity Is Not Professional Competence
Let us return to George Clooney.
Everybody knows George Clooney.
Almost nobody outside the relevant medical circles knows the name of the surgeon who saved my life.
Yet when my life was at stake, there was no contest.
I needed the surgeon.
Not the celebrity.
No amount of television popularity could substitute for the knowledge, training, experience, and judgement required to perform that operation.
The surgeon’s competence was demonstrated by the outcome.
I survived.
The actor’s competence was demonstrated by a different outcome.
People watched, enjoyed, and admired his performance.
Both were successful.
But they were successful at different things.
And this is precisely what I believe the Excel community needs to understand.
A person can be an outstanding Excel content creator without being an experienced enterprise systems designer.
A person can have enormous technical knowledge of formulas without having experience deploying systems across hundreds of users.
A person can produce extraordinary demonstrations without ever having been responsible for delivering a business-critical solution.
Equally, a highly experienced enterprise professional may have little interest in creating fashionable social media content.
These are different capabilities.
Different professions, in some respects.
Different measures of success.
A million views do not establish that a technique is suitable for enterprise deployment.
Just as a million viewers watching George Clooney perform fictional surgery do not make him a cardiac surgeon.
Popularity is evidence of popularity.
It is not evidence of professional suitability for a different purpose.
11. The Fantasy Has Become the Authority
Here is the truly extraordinary development.
We now have a social media environment in which the most visible Excel personalities can become, in the public imagination, the authorities on what Excel is capable of.
Not necessarily because they have deployed the most demanding systems.
Not necessarily because they have solved the most expensive business problems.
Not necessarily because they understand the historical development of spreadsheet and database technologies.
But because they have become successful communicators.
Again, that success is legitimate.
The problem is what happens next.
Their visibility can cause their experience to be mistaken for the boundaries of the technology itself.
What they demonstrate becomes what Excel can do.
What they do not demonstrate becomes something Excel supposedly cannot do.
And what they have never encountered may be treated as though it does not exist.
This is how an entire industry can develop a distorted picture of reality.
It is also how an established professional capability can be rediscovered, repackaged, and promoted as something revolutionary.
Or dismissed as unnecessary.
Or simply ignored.
And when somebody with practical experience introduces the missing context, he can appear to be the outsider.
The troublemaker.
The critic.
The person who doesn’t understand how things are done.
Imagine that.
The actual surgeon has become the unwelcome visitor to the operating theatre.
Because the people running the film set have forgotten that their operating theatre is a set.
12. Who Is Fooling Whom?
This leads to an uncomfortable question.
Are the participants in this industry knowingly presenting theatrical demonstrations as practical professional solutions?
Or have some become so immersed in their own environment that they genuinely no longer recognise the distinction?
There is a third possibility.
Perhaps the distinction is simply irrelevant to their business model.
If the objective is to produce attractive content, then the most elaborate, visually interesting, technically surprising solution may be preferable to the simplest and most appropriate one.
The helicopter makes a better video than the zebra crossing.
The spectacular LAMBDA formula makes a more compelling tutorial than a straightforward transaction ledger.
The ingenious Power Query workaround attracts more attention than explaining a database architecture that has existed for decades.
And the audience rewards the spectacle.
This creates a powerful incentive.
Not necessarily to teach the best way of solving a problem.
But to teach the most interesting way of using the product.
Product demonstration replaces problem-solving education.
And eventually, the distinction between the two can disappear from the conversation altogether.
This is not merely a problem for Excel.
It is a problem wherever an industry devoted to communicating about a subject becomes more influential than the people professionally practising it.
When that happens, popularity can become a substitute for evidence.
Presentation can become a substitute for competence.
And criticism of a demonstration can be treated as a personal attack rather than an opportunity to examine whether the demonstrated method is appropriate.
That is a dangerous intellectual environment.
Not because entertainment is bad.
But because entertainment has been mistaken for professional authority.
13. The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
So let me ask the question at the heart of this article.
Are we teaching people how to solve business problems using Excel, or are we teaching people how to produce impressive demonstrations using Excel?
Both activities can have value.
Both can coexist.
But they should not be confused.
When I was working with hundreds of budget holders across an international organisation, my objective was not to create a spreadsheet that would impress a social media audience.
It was to make the budgeting process work.
When I built Excel solutions connected to central databases, my objective was not to demonstrate that I knew SQL or ADO.
It was to enable multiple users to work with consistent information.
When I created systems that allowed management to consolidate, review, drill down, and update information, the measure of success was not the elegance of the formulas.
It was the effectiveness of the business process.
And when my clients increased my remuneration, they were not rewarding entertainment.
They were rewarding business value.
That is the world I am talking about.
The real operating theatre.
The place where the patient is real.
Where the problem is real.
Where the consequences are real.
And where the result matters more than the performance.
14. The Final Absurdity
Imagine, once more, George Clooney standing in his television operating theatre.
The cameras are rolling.
The director calls for action.
Clooney delivers a brilliant performance.
The episode is a success.
The audience applauds.
Everybody is happy.
Then the actual cardiac surgeon walks in.
He looks around.
He explains that the equipment is theatrical, the patient is a dummy, and the procedures are being simulated.
He explains that a real operation would require different preparations, different standards, and different professional responsibilities.
And George Clooney turns to him and says:
“Why are you always criticising people?”
“Why are you being so negative?”
“Why can’t you just appreciate what we’re doing?”
And finally:
“You clearly don’t understand modern medicine.”
There it is.
The complete inversion.
The actor is now judging the surgeon’s professional competence by the standards of acting.
The fantasy has become the benchmark.
Reality is being criticised for failing to conform to it.
And the person who explains the difference is treated as the problem.
That is the absurdity I have been trying to expose.
Not that people make Excel videos.
Not that they develop ingenious techniques.
Not that they become popular.
But that some of the conversation around Excel appears to have lost the ability to distinguish between demonstrating a technology and professionally applying that technology to solve real business problems.
And, most disturbingly, the very people attempting to restore that distinction can find themselves dismissed as hostile or disruptive.
Conclusion: I Know Which Operating Theatre Saved My Life
Twenty years ago, I lay on an operating table in Sri Lanka.
My life depended on the knowledge and competence of a surgical team.
I didn’t need a celebrity.
I didn’t need a performance.
I didn’t need somebody who could convincingly imitate a surgeon.
I needed the real thing.
And I was fortunate enough to get it.
Today, when I look at the public conversation surrounding Excel, I see a similar distinction that desperately needs to be recognised.
There is the world of demonstrations, tutorials, popularity, and content production.
And there is the world of business-critical systems, professional responsibility, and measurable results.
Both worlds can be valuable.
But they are not interchangeable.
And nobody should be criticised merely for explaining the difference.
I will end with a simple observation.
George Clooney is infinitely more famous than the surgeon who saved my life.
That does not make him a better surgeon.
It does not make him a surgeon at all.
And if he were to criticise the actual surgeon for failing to follow the methods used on the set of ER, we would all recognise the ridiculousness of the situation.
So why should we accept the equivalent confusion in the world of Excel?
Why should popularity be mistaken for professional authority?
Why should theatrical demonstrations be treated as the standard against which real business solutions are judged?
And why should people with decades of practical experience be discouraged from explaining what is missing?
The most important question is not whether the film is entertaining.
It is whether the audience knows it is watching a film.
Because when fantasy forgets that it is fantasy, and begins condemning reality for being different, we have moved beyond entertainment.
We have entered the theatre of the absurd.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where much of today’s conversation about Excel appears to be taking place.
Hiran de Silva
October 2026
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