Ref: Post on LinkedIn by Giles Male on Wednesday, May 7th, 2025
There’s been some recent discussion around the quality of spreadsheet solutions in business—particularly those that are janky, fragmented, or half-baked. Andrew Moss and others have argued that the root cause is a lack of training.
But I fundamentally disagree.
Yes, training is important—but most of the training out there is for ‘how to build standalone spreadsheets for individual users’ – not spreadsheets in the enterprise. That’s an entirely different thing. That’s the real issue.
Think of my “purple squares” sketch as a metaphor. It represents what’s happening across many organizations: teams are being trained in how to make better purple squares—prettier, faster, more efficient—but the bigger picture is being ignored. We’re still left with fragmented, siloed systems that don’t talk to each other. The problem isn’t that people don’t know how to use Excel; it’s that they’re being trained to use it in the wrong way in an enterprise environment.
Some blame management for not investing enough in training. But management has invested—what they haven’t seen is any real return. Why? Because training focused on the wrong outcomes doesn’t fix broken processes. The architecture is wrong. We need to move beyond ‘spreadsheets designed for one person on one machine’. What’s needed is a shift to an enterprise-grade, end-to-end model—a proper client-server architecture that fits the complexity of the business.
So, before we pour more money into teaching people how to make better purple squares, we need to stop and ask: are we solving the right problem? It’s not about the shade of purple—it’s about the design of the entire system.
Management needs spray guns. But we’re only teaching how to paint elaborate purple squares with a paint brush.
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