The Great Excel Myth: Why Hub-and-Spoke Isn’t Hard—and Why It Changes Everything

By Hiran de Silva

There’s a deeply entrenched misconception circulating among Excel educators and influencers—Mark Proctor being one of them—that applying hub-and-spoke architecture in Excel is a prohibitively complex task. The belief is that it demands significant IT resources, advanced technical skill, and organizational upheaval. That belief is wrong. It’s not just mistaken—it’s misleading in a way that has cost businesses millions, if not billions, in lost efficiency.

Let’s dismantle that myth.

Paper Paradigms Don’t Scale—Excel Does

When people claim that Excel doesn’t scale, they’re not talking about Excel. They’re talking about a paradigm—the big-sheet-of-paper approach that Excel mimics on-screen. You’ve seen it: column after column stretching endlessly to the right, packed with names, figures, formulas, and chaos.

Take the classic “Christmas expenses” scenario: three friends split costs for shared items. In most “modern Excel” tutorials, this is solved by laying everything out across columns and applying UNPIVOT, followed by nested SUMIFS. It works—for three friends. But what if there are 3,000? Or 300,000? The worksheet becomes unwieldy. You scroll endlessly, error-check tirelessly, and maintain a forest of formulas that become exponentially brittle.

That’s what people mean when they say Excel doesn’t scale.

But it’s not Excel that doesn’t scale. It’s the paper paradigm that fails.

The Hub-and-Spoke Solution: Designed for Scale

Now consider the alternative. A hub-and-spoke architecture. Instead of laying data across a giant sheet, you capture each record—each transaction—as a single row in a structured table. That table is your hub. Users, like spokes, interact with it through simple input and output mechanisms—buttons, forms, and queries.

Let’s return to our Christmas example. Instead of building a horizontal monster spreadsheet:

1. A user inputs a transaction: Bo owes $20, Tania owes $20, Jay is owed $40.
2. Click a Post button. That entry goes to the hub—a centralized data table.
3. Do this for thousands more transactions. No bloating spreadsheet. No complex formulas.
4. Click Get, and a fully calculated summary appears: who owes whom and how much.
5. Want to audit? Double-click any name and pull a filtered report. Double-click a transaction to view its full breakdown.

All of this—done in Excel. With ease. At scale.

“That’s Not Excel!” Oh Yes, It Is.

Proctor’s critique hinges on a narrow definition of Excel: if it doesn’t ship with Excel, it’s not Excel.

But here’s the fact: this capability has shipped with Excel for over 30 years. Since Microsoft Office Professional 4.2, Excel has supported ActiveX Data Objects (ADO)—a built-in technology that enables Excel to connect to external data tables, including Access or SQL Server databases.

This functionality is part of Microsoft Office’s design philosophy: empowering users. You don’t need to ask IT for permission to use it. You don’t need advanced coding skills. You don’t even need to install anything extra. It’s there. Right-click your desktop, create a new Access database, build a table, and start using Excel the way it was meant to be used in the enterprise.

This is not fringe tech. This is native, mature, industrial-strength Excel.

Governance, Simplicity, and Political Smoke

Another concern often raised is that such architecture introduces governance or risk issues. But ask yourself: is it riskier to build untraceable spreadsheets with thousands of formulas and no audit trail, or to input transactions into a centralized, queryable data structure with full transparency and automatic validation?

Hub-and-spoke offers better governance—not worse.

And the supposed “aptitude gap” among users? That’s another fiction. If you can create a Word file or a PowerPoint slide, you can create an Access table. No extra skill needed. Just different thinking.

From Temp to Trusted Advisor: A Case Study

Here’s where theory meets reality. I once joined a client on a six-week Excel temp assignment. They were drowning in spreadsheet chaos—unscalable, unmanageable, and unloved.

I introduced this architecture.

• I showed how input could flow into a central table.
• I showed how outputs could be generated instantly.
• I showed how audits, queries, and filters replaced 100,000-cell formulas.

They were stunned. IT had insisted this couldn’t be done.

The result?

• My rate tripled immediately.
• I stayed not six weeks, but six years.
• My pay increased 7.5x over that period.
• My total billing over that time? £1.4 million, in today’s money.
• And all of it—every single advancement—came from this simple hub-and-spoke method built on Excel’s native capability.

Why Are We Still Ignoring This?

Because of misinformation. Because social media teachers, influencers, and even Microsoft MVPs continue to teach Excel as if it’s still 1997. Ironically, they dismiss these capabilities as non-Excel—even though they’ve existed since Excel 97.

The result? Excel gets blamed for being clunky and unscalable. FP&A vendors then swoop in to sell tools based on Excel’s “inadequacy”—an inadequacy that doesn’t exist when Excel is used properly.

It’s a $100 billion lie.

Final Thought: An Invitation

Mark Proctor says hub-and-spoke isn’t feasible. I say: prove it.

Or better yet—come and learn it. Anyone can. No permissions. No IT blockers. No licenses. Just Excel. Used properly.

This is not an obscure hack. It is the most powerful, scalable, auditable, user-empowering feature Excel has ever had—and it’s been hiding in plain sight.

It’s time to stop blaming Excel.

It’s time to stop teaching the paper paradigm.

And it’s time to unleash the Excel we were given 30 years ago.

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