By Hiran de Silva
Chris Argent’s latest post, in conversation with Giles Male and Mike Rose, touches on Excel’s LAMBDA functions and the usual suspects of so-called modern features: Power Query, Power Pivot, dynamic arrays, Office Scripts, and XLOOKUP. Their enthusiasm is palpable. But what exactly are they excited about?
Let’s look past the branding.
LAMBDA functions? A way to define custom functions inside Excel? We could do that with user-defined functions (UDFs) written in VBA back in the 1990s.
Power Query? A graphical way to import, transform, and load data into Excel’s memory? Again, mid-90s. ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) allowed Excel to pull external data into memory as disconnected recordsets, with full programmability and logic.
Dynamic Arrays? Recordsets already provided this behavior—grids of data returned from a query, manipulated and distributed with precision.
Office Scripts? JavaScript-based automation? We’ve been automating Excel with COM and JavaScript through Office Web Components for decades.
Power Automate? A workflow engine? Enterprises already had this, often more robustly, through VBA-driven event handlers and backend process orchestration.
Power Pivot? It’s a pivot table backed by a data model. But seasoned developers have been doing this for years by feeding pivot tables from centralized databases using SQL and ADO.
XLOOKUP? Functionally redundant when you’ve been building relationships between tables in structured, normalized databases—then connecting those to Excel front ends.
GROUP BY / Pivot in Power Query? Classic SQL. Nothing new.
Cascading dropdowns? We had those in Excel via class modules and event-driven architecture long before the web-based equivalents.
All of this begs a fundamental question: what, exactly, is new?
What we’re seeing is not innovation, but rebranding. A repackaging of well-established enterprise capabilities into more GUI-friendly or influencer-friendly formats—often targeted at users who’ve never worked with Excel as a client in a client-server architecture.
The Real Issue: A Miseducated Market
This brings us to the bigger problem—the way Excel has been taught and promoted in recent years. The social media-led education space has heavily encouraged “inside-the-box” thinking. New users (and even experienced ones) are led to believe that Power Query, XLOOKUP, or dynamic arrays are radical new inventions.
They’re not. They are alternative front-ends or syntactic sugar layered over ideas that have existed for decades.
There’s nothing wrong with simplification. But oversimplification becomes a problem when it miseducates—when it hides the bigger picture of how Excel can operate as a truly enterprise-grade tool.
This is the third post in a series aimed at unmasking this illusion. My goal isn’t to diminish the usefulness of these new features but to highlight what’s being ignored: the depth and power of Excel’s real capabilities when implemented as part of a system—leveraging external databases, VBA, and structured automation.
In the right architecture, Excel is not a toy. It’s a control panel for an entire business process.
Conclusion
The tools we now celebrate as innovations are echoes of enterprise practices long established—but poorly understood by the influencer-driven narrative dominating Excel education today. True progress doesn’t lie in discovering LAMBDA functions. It lies in rediscovering the enterprise model Excel was always capable of serving—and finally putting it to work.
Add comment