By Hiran de Silva
Excel became the dominant force it is today not because it was powerful in the traditional sense, but because it was agile. It allowed individuals and teams to respond to change—quickly, flexibly, and creatively. That is the secret of Excel’s global success.
In nature, it’s not the strongest or most complex species that survive, but those most adaptable to change. The same applies in business. Complex systems, inflexible tools, and rigid processes become obsolete because they cannot keep pace with a changing environment. Simpler, more agile systems thrive.
The Agility of Excel in Isolation
When working alone or in small teams, Excel’s agility is unmatched. Whether you’re using traditional Excel or its newer features—Power Query, Dynamic Arrays, LAMBDA—you’re in full control. You can build, edit, test, and deploy at the speed of thought.
You are the designer. You are the customer. You don’t need to raise a support ticket or wait for IT.
This is where Excel’s agility shines: in isolated, self-contained problem-solving.
The Breakdown at Scale
But when we step into the larger world of enterprise operations, and we try to apply these same single-user techniques to a multi-user, multi-process environment—things begin to break.
- We send files to each other via email to collect inputs.
- We link workbooks together to consolidate.
- We bundle files into a shared folder so Power Query can crawl them.
What was once agile becomes tangled. Clunky. Fragile.
Suddenly, the same Excel that gave us speed is accused of being unscalable.
But this conclusion is a category error. Excel isn’t broken. The way we’re using it is.
Enterprise Agility Requires a Change in Design
The problem isn’t Excel—it’s that we’re applying small-scale techniques to large-scale challenges.
Imagine trying to run a global airline using post-it notes and walkie-talkies. It’s not that post-it notes are bad—they’re just not the right tool for air traffic control.
In the same way, sending spreadsheets around by email, or dumping them into shared folders for Power Query to read, is the walkie-talkie equivalent of enterprise Excel use. It works—barely—on a small scale. But it collapses under enterprise demand.
The Irony: Enterprise-Scale Excel Is Simpler, Not Harder
Here’s the twist most people—including many Excel “experts”—don’t know:
To regain Excel’s legendary agility at enterprise scale, you actually need less complexity, not more.
The key is to shift from treating Excel as the container of data to treating it as a client—a front-end to a central, shared system. When you connect Excel to a relational database (like Access or SQL Server), you separate the logic from the data. You can instantly retrieve only what’s needed, update records centrally, and avoid all the clunky logistics of emailing files or chaining formulas across workbooks.
You stop moving the haystack and simply ask for the needle.
It’s faster, lighter, and radically more scalable.
And ironically—it’s much easier to learn than the Power BI stack or the twisted contortions of “modern Excel” workarounds.
The Global Excel Airbus Illustration
To illustrate the point, consider the Global Excel Airbus Challenge from the Mission Impossible series.
Delegates flying to the Global Excel Summit want to choose their seats. If each one updates a shared spreadsheet, or sends their preference by email, chaos follows. Files flying back and forth, updates being overwritten, confusion over who booked what seat.
It’s manageable for ten people. It’s a disaster for a hundred. At scale, it breaks. And so critics say, “See? Excel doesn’t scale.”
But what if we used Excel as a booking front-end, and the seating data lived in a database?
Each delegate sees the live seat map. They click a button. Their choice is logged in the central system instantly. No file-sharing. No overwrites. No duplicates. And everyone sees the updates in real time.
Suddenly, Excel looks more like a platform than a spreadsheet. Fast. Elegant. Scalable.
Mission Impossible: Busting the Myth
That’s what the Mission Impossible series is about.
Each episode tackles a problem that has already been written off as “impossible in Excel.” But the real impossibility isn’t Excel—it’s the way Excel is typically used, taught, and misunderstood.
The critics of Excel, especially in the FP&A and ERP software space, mistake poor technique for poor tools. And the mainstream Excel education ecosystem rarely shows an alternative—because that would mean venturing into enterprise design.
But that’s exactly where the future lies.
A Better Way Forward
It’s time to stop blaming the road sign for pointing the wrong way.
The agility of Excel can be recovered—and even multiplied—at enterprise scale. But not by pushing the same single-user methods harder. It takes a design shift. A change of mindset.
And surprisingly, it doesn’t require complex tools, steep learning curves, or expensive consultants. Just a clearer view of Excel’s real capabilities.
The Mission Impossible series exists to demonstrate this—one impossible-seeming challenge at a time.
Because once you’ve seen how little effort it takes to bring enterprise agility to Excel, you’ll never go back.
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