By Hiran de Silva
Whenever Excel is criticized, the main accusation that surfaces again and again is its supposed lack of scalability. Most other criticisms cascade from that one central point. You’ll hear people say things like, “Excel spreadsheets are fragile,” “they break easily,” or “they’re unmanageable”—but underlying all of this is that Excel is, in their view, not scalable.
And this criticism resonates. Many nod in agreement, thinking of their own frustrating experiences with unruly spreadsheets or executive complaints. But here’s the crucial misunderstanding: when people say “Excel is not scalable,” what they really mean is that the paradigm of Excel as a large sheet of paper is not scalable.
Let me explain.
The Paper Paradigm
To most users, Excel still resembles a vast digital sheet of paper—just with more rows and columns. Yes, technically we have over 16,000 columns and more than a million rows. But true scalability isn’t just about physical size. Scalability has multiple dimensions: process scalability, collaborative scalability, auditability, agility under change—and Excel, when viewed only as a digital notepad, fails on all of them.
But Excel is not just a large sheet of paper.
Scalability Requires Simplicity and Agility
To understand true scalability, we must think differently. We must move beyond literal thinking and into lateral thinking. And that’s difficult for some. Literal thinkers struggle to conceptualize what Excel could be other than a digital piece of paper. But for those open to creative, outside-the-box thinking, the penny begins to drop.
Let’s borrow from nature for a moment. The organisms and systems that have survived and thrived are not the most complex. They are the ones that are both simple and agile. The same principle applies to systems built in Excel.
If your approach is complex—even with an agile tool—you’ll still create a mess. Agility simply allows you to build your complex mess faster. Conversely, if your approach is simple but your tool lacks agility, you’ll struggle to adapt or scale.
Excel’s power lies in combining agility with simplicity. But most people don’t use it that way. They create complex systems and then exploit Excel’s agility to build more and more complexity—celebrated in long webinars and multi-day training courses. This is how Excel Hell is born.
From Complexity to Simplicity: A Practical Example
Let me illustrate.
My good friend Oz du Soleil once shared a technique to solve a seemingly complex holiday expense reconciliation problem. Three friends had spent different amounts on gifts and agreed to share the costs in different proportions. The question: Who owes what to whom?
Oz solved this by unpivoting the data and using a series of SUMIFS formulas. It worked. The answer was correct. And many in his audience thanked him for cracking what they perceived to be a complex problem.
But here’s the twist: when I showed this problem to several colleagues, two of them—and myself—saw the solution instantly, in under ten seconds. We saw it as simple. Why?
Lateral thinking.
Instead of focusing on step-by-step calculations, we saw the pattern. If two people owe $20 each for a $60 gift, and one person has paid the full $60, then that person is owed $40. That’s it. Capture that on a simple matrix, record the debit and credit, and the system balances—no unpivoting, no formulas, just logic.
That insight is what lateral thinking delivers.
The Chair With Three Legs
I often use an icebreaker image in training: a chair with one leg missing. Some describe it as “a chair with three legs.” Others say it’s “a chair with a leg missing.” Both are accurate, but only one mindset recognizes the problem—the missing leg.
The same applies to spreadsheets. Literal thinkers only see what’s there. Lateral thinkers see what should be there—and what’s missing. Like Columbo in his crime scenes, they notice what doesn’t fit. They are bothered by the gap.
That “bother” is the key to creative problem-solving.
Scaling the Problem
Now let’s take Oz’s three-friend scenario and scale it.
Imagine six friends—yes, Chandler, Monica, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey—are traveling together. They live in different places. They buy different tickets, book different hotels. The system needs to track who owes what, across different events, without a central administrator. They want it to work forever. They want it to be fraud-proof. Oh, and now the group is growing—600 friends and counting.
Can Excel handle this?
Absolutely—if designed with simplicity and agility. But it won’t if you build it like a paper form.
Beyond the Literal: Why Social Media Content Fails Us
This brings me to another point: most Excel teaching content is literal. It records screens. It shows buttons and formulas. But it can’t record thinking.
You cannot capture lateral thinking with a screen recording. You can only explain it—through allegory, example, and deep conversation. That’s why these concepts are absent from the five-minute YouTube tips that dominate our feeds. They chase popularity and spectacle, not insight.
And frankly, it suits the FP&A tools industry to maintain the myth that Excel isn’t scalable. It fuels their marketing. They rely on the literal interpretation of Excel’s limits while ignoring what’s possible with conceptual clarity and creative problem-solving.
So when Paul Barnhurst and others say, “This problem needs a non-Excel solution,” ask them: “Why? Isn’t what you mean actually a simplified solution that’s implemented in a structured, automated way?”
Because Excel—when used with lateral thinking—is precisely capable of that.
Final Thoughts
To truly scale Excel, the first step is not technical. It’s mental. It’s about changing how we see Excel—from a digital paper sheet to an agile, scalable platform for structured process thinking.
It’s about teaching people how to think laterally. Not just learning functions and formulas, but seeing what’s missing. Just like that fourth leg of the chair.
Let’s stop indulging in unnecessary complexity. Let’s start creating sustainable simplicity—because that is the real future of Excel.
Thank you for listening. Good night.
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