By Hiran de Silva

For decades, Microsoft Excel has quietly powered the world’s most critical decisions — from corporate budgets to national infrastructure plans. Yet in recent years, something strange has happened. A generation of so-called “modern Excel” experts has flooded social media, preaching simplified tools, flashy dashboards, and techniques that barely scratch the surface of Excel’s real power. In their enthusiasm to democratize Excel, they have, perhaps unintentionally, reduced it to a toy.

But behind the scenes — in the boardrooms, the finance departments, and the nerve centres of large organizations — another story is unfolding. And if you’ve ever sensed that your spreadsheet skills could do more, or if you’ve ever felt the friction of “modern Excel” not quite delivering in the real world, you’re not alone.

It’s time for the next chapter.
It’s time to go Beyond Power Query.

The Misunderstood Giant

There’s a quiet tragedy unfolding in the world of Excel. Its most powerful features — the ones that connect spreadsheets to databases, automate processes at scale, and support true enterprise architecture — are being neglected or actively discouraged.

This isn’t just oversight. It’s the result of two powerful forces:

1. The Tech Industry’s Long War on Excel
   For 25 years, vendors have demonized Excel — portraying it as unscalable, error-prone, and amateurish — while pushing their own overpriced, rigid alternatives. They weren’t wrong to critique poor spreadsheet practice. But they never acknowledged the counter-narrative: that Excel, when used properly, can outperform those very systems in agility, cost, and relevance.
2. The Social Media Cartel
   Meanwhile, a new wave of influencers has arisen — the “modern Excel” community — who chase engagement by oversimplifying the tool. Features like Power Query, Dynamic Arrays, and Lambda functions are celebrated not because they solve enterprise problems, but because they produce viral posts. Enterprise-scale solutions? Integration with relational databases? Multi-user workflows? Rarely mentioned. Why? Because their audience — largely comprised of novices — isn’t asking those questions. And because those teaching the features often don’t know the answers.

Together, these forces have led to a stunning result:
The most scalable and transformative features of Excel are now virtually unknown.

The Purple Square and the Spray Gun

Let me offer an analogy.

Imagine a factory floor where each worker is assigned to paint a one-centimeter purple square. Diligently, each paints their tiny square, proud of their skill. They are trained, certified, and occasionally promoted for doing so with flair.

Then one day, someone walks in with a spray gun and says:
“We can do the whole wall in seconds — and do it in the same shade, with no borders to stitch together.”

That’s what it’s like to introduce enterprise-grade, database-integrated Excel systems to a team conditioned by YouTube tutorials and social media demos. To them, it looks suspicious. Maybe even dangerous. “Where’s the Power Query?” they ask. “Where are the formulas?”

But to management — to those who feel the pain of reconciliation delays, broken links, and untraceable formula errors — the spray gun is a revelation.

A Career-Bending Opportunity

Let’s be blunt: mastering Excel’s client-server architecture — using ADO, SQL, and relational databases like Access — is not just about being “better at Excel.” It’s about transforming the entire way your organization handles data.

We’re talking about:

• Instant consolidation of hundreds of sheets
• Secure, auditable write-back to centralized databases
• True version control
• Process automation that removes manual effort, not rebrands it
• Live reporting across departments without performance bottlenecks

In other words: real scalability, real control, real speed.

If you can do this — and I promise, it’s not as hard as the industry wants you to think — then you become the only person in the building who can solve problems everyone else assumes require new systems or new hires.

That’s how you triple your pay with Excel.
Not by learning another formula.
But by stepping Beyond Power Query.

A Diplomatic Path Forward

Criticizing Power Query or modern Excel publicly can be risky. There is a subtle cartel-like behavior in the influencer community — a tendency to protect one another, circle the wagons, and shout down dissent. But this isn’t a war of personalities. It’s a crossroads for the Excel community.

We can include Power Query where appropriate. It has its place — just like a screwdriver has its place in a carpenter’s toolkit. But we must not pretend it is a spray gun. And we must not allow the enterprise conversation to be sidelined for the sake of clicks.

The Pioneer’s Role

Being a pioneer means seeing the gap between what is taught and what is needed — and choosing to act.

It means:

• Showing others what Excel can really do
• Giving management the systems they thought required expensive ERP tools
• Mentoring your peers not just in features, but in architecture
• Walking the diplomatic line: respectful of others, but unafraid to tell the truth

And above all, it means painting beyond the purple square.

Join the Movement

I’m building a movement for those ready to pioneer this next chapter. It’s for professionals who know the value of Excel — but are tired of being told it’s obsolete. It’s for those who want to build real solutions, not just generate engagement.

Join us. Go beyond the dashboard. Beyond the worksheet. Beyond Power Query.

This isn’t just the next chapter of Excel.
It’s the chapter they never told you about.

And it starts with you.

EDIT

People are already scared of the complexity of (eg) Power Query, as well are bosses are already scared. How would an idea like ‘beyond’ sit with that? Wouldn’t that be ‘more scary’?

No. The scary techniques are scary because the wrong techniques are applied in the wrong context. You’ve got to see a demo.