By Hiran de Silva
In the last 10, 15—let’s just round it up to 20—years, something rather curious has been unfolding in the world of Excel. Microsoft, in its boundless enthusiasm for user engagement (read: market expansion), has gradually rebranded the world’s most powerful business tool into a sparkly toy box for casual users. What once resembled a Formula 1 machine, designed for enterprise-grade speed and control, is now increasingly being retrofit with cupholders and fuzzy dice—because, apparently, that’s what the driver demographic now demands.
Let’s be clear: the Excel of old was ugly. Gloriously, unashamedly, powerfully ugly. It didn’t care about being charming. It cared about getting the job done—with VBA, ADO, external data connections, relational database joins, and automation capabilities that could run entire financial departments with ruthless precision. It wasn’t here to flirt. It was here to reconcile.
Fast-forward to now, and Excel has become a sort of fashion-forward, Coachella-attending cousin who’s discovered pastel gradients, drop shadows, and—oh look!—Copilot that tells you how to VLOOKUP. Bless. The focus has shifted from enterprise muscle to social media dazzle. Suddenly, Excel isn’t something you wield anymore—it’s something you unbox. It’s a carnival of pop-up panels, guided tutorials, and Dynamic Arrays so friendly, you half-expect them to ask how your weekend was.
Enter Power Query, the darling of the LinkedIn influencer class. Slick, visual, and entirely the opposite of scalable. It’s like giving a paintbrush to someone building an oil rig. Sure, it looks productive on a YouTube thumbnail, but show me the CTO who says, “What we really need to run our global operations is more ‘From Table/Range’ wizards.”
This is what happens when software design begins to serve the lowest common denominator—what I’ve politely referred to as the “local box mindset.” These are the users at the bottom of the Excel skill pyramid, encouraged to feel like data scientists for pivoting a slicer. And the marketing machine has delivered for them. In fact, it’s gone into overdrive.
Meanwhile, those of us building enterprise-scale, transformative systems with Excel and relational databases—yes, using tools like ADO, SQL, and yes, VBA—have been pushed to the fringes, like exiled professors of a forgotten science. Social media drowns us out. The influencers dance on screen, pushing their “modern” Excel content with the enthusiasm of a cult leader at a whiteboard. And if you dare mention the words Access or client-server, you’re branded a legacy luddite from the dark age of Office 2003.
But here’s the twist—the opportunity in all this noise is immense. Because while the majority are busy spray-painting spreadsheets purple and calling it innovation, the real artisans are picking up the spray gun. The one that automates, consolidates, reconciles and transforms entire processes at scale.
So yes, Microsoft has dumbed down Excel. But in doing so, they’ve also dumbed down the competition. And if you know how to harness the full power of Excel—quietly, efficiently, underneath the influencer radar—you’re not just working smarter. You’re building things they literally don’t know are possible.
Which makes you a magician in a village of party clowns.
And that, dear reader, is a spectacularly good place to be.
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