By Hiran de Silva
Scalability. It’s the most common accusation thrown at Excel when it comes to enterprise-level use: Excel doesn’t scale. And yet, that criticism usually misses one key detail—the way Excel is used, not Excel itself, is what fails to scale.
In this article, we’ll explore why Excel appears to be unscalable, how this misunderstanding emerged, and how a single architectural shift—what I call “one small step for a spreadsheet”—transforms Excel from a glorified paper substitute into a globally scalable enterprise engine.
The Enterprise Blind Spot
Most spreadsheets play a role in a larger business process. Whether for budgeting, reconciliation, forecasting, or reporting, they’re almost always part of an end-to-end flow involving multiple people, departments, and even geographies. Yet, most are built as if they operate in a vacuum.
Why?
Because most users think inside the box—their job description, their department, their data. From this perspective, there’s no incentive to see or solve the larger, connected picture. And since most Excel training is aimed at this level of user, the spreadsheet remains a local tool for a local job.
Management, however, sees the bigger picture. They see the fragmented nature of processes, the lack of integration, the siloed data. But often, they feel disempowered to challenge the status quo—especially if it means diving into “technical” changes.
The Mental Model Problem: Paper Thinking
The real issue isn’t Excel. It’s our mental model of Excel.
Most people unconsciously treat a spreadsheet like a digital sheet of paper. This is understandable—spreadsheets began as isolated files on DOS-era desktops, disconnected from each other and from business systems. But Excel moved on. It grew. By the mid-1990s, Excel, in the hands of power users, became a powerhouse capable of supporting enterprise-level processes.
And then… social media happened.
Social media platforms became the dominant medium for Excel education. Influencers, trainers, and even certifications began teaching Excel as if it still lived in the 1980s. The result? A regression to paper thinking.
A False Sense of Scale
The rise of modern Excel features—Power Query, Power Pivot, dynamic arrays, XLOOKUP, LAMBDA—has created a mirage of scalability.
These are powerful tools. But crucially, they’re powerful inside the box. They don’t solve the architectural issues of scale. They make you faster and smarter with one spreadsheet. But real scalability—the kind that transcends local files, allows for system-wide integration, and adapts over time—requires a different approach.
These modern tools promote a form of cell-to-cell scalability, as Peter Bartholomew aptly put it. But enterprise processes need end-to-end scalability.
What Real Scale Looks Like
Real scalability involves:
- Volume: More data, more users, more complexity—without slowing down.
- Geography: Global collaboration with live updates.
- Functionality: The ability to add new features without rebuilding everything.
- Extendability: A process that evolves with the business, not locked in by past constraints.
These are impossible in a spreadsheet that’s passed around by email or shared on OneDrive like a PDF. That’s not scale—that’s spreadsheet spaghetti.
The One Small Step: Separate the Data
Here’s the small, revolutionary step: separate the data from the spreadsheet.
Store your data centrally—in a database, even a simple one like Access or cloud-hosted SQL Server. Let Excel act as the interface, the logic engine, the reporting layer. Any spreadsheet, anywhere in the world, can now plug into the same data model.
This is not a complex IT transformation. It’s the client-server model—a concept invented over 30 years ago. In fact, Microsoft showcased this architecture in a 1993 DevCast led by none other than Satya Nadella (yes, the current CEO). Excel connecting to a backend database, interacting with Access and other Office tools in real time. It was—and still is—native functionality.
The Digital Nervous System
Bill Gates called it “the digital nervous system.” Data flows centrally, updates trigger downstream events, and the business responds dynamically, like a living organism.
And this architecture isn’t limited to ERP platforms. It’s exactly what Excel is capable of when you stop treating it like a static worksheet.
The Oz Challenge: A Scalable Demo
Take a simple scenario: Oz du Soleil’s classic example of three siblings splitting the cost of holiday gifts. It’s a great local spreadsheet task. But when we reframe the architecture, something remarkable happens.
By placing the transaction data in a central database:
- We can scale it to 600 or 6,000 participants with no changes.
- Users can self-serve their balances.
- We can add audit trails and detailed breakdowns on demand.
- We enable real-time insights and global collaboration.
One small architectural step. Infinite scale.
Beyond Volume: Functional Scalability
True scalability isn’t just about size. It’s about adaptability.
If you build a spreadsheet today for Task A, and next month you need Task B, you shouldn’t have to start from scratch. But most spreadsheets are frozen in their original purpose. When you separate data from logic, and logic from presentation, you unlock the ability to add, extend, adapt—without disruption.
Why We’re Stuck
We’re stuck because education is stuck. Influencers teach features. But features without architecture just give us fancier paper.
The social media model targets the largest audience—entry-level users inside the box. So the enterprise-scale functionality of Excel goes untaught and unnoticed. And this has created an absurd situation: the most powerful business tool in the world is being misused at massive scale.
We’re pulling motorcars with horses.
The Payoff: Agility Meets Scalability
The brilliance of Excel is that it’s not just scalable—it’s agile.
You can implement a system-wide architecture quickly and cheaply, without waiting for IT or buying expensive software. That agility is what makes Excel so dangerous when used well—and so tragic when misunderstood.
Scalability comes from:
- Simplicity: Clear data structures and roles.
- Agility: Rapid implementation and iteration.
- Architecture: Centralized data, decentralized logic.
Final Thought: It’s All Still Excel
You don’t need new software. You don’t need a coding degree. You don’t need a six-figure FP&A platform.
You just need a better mental model of Excel.
Excel is not the problem.
It’s the paper paradigm that’s holding us back.
So take one small step. Separate the data. Watch everything change.
And yes—do it with the same Excel you already have.
If you’d like to see this in action, I demonstrate this transformation in my Oz de Soleil Christmas Expenses explainer—scaling it from three friends to six thousand without rewriting a single formula. Because that’s what happens when Excel stops pretending to be paper and starts behaving like a platform.
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