By Hiran de Silva
For years, Power Query has been hailed as one of the most powerful innovations in Excel. Search YouTube and you’ll find more than 50,000 tutorials teaching you how to use it for all sorts of tasks, with budget consolidation sitting near the top of the list. Scroll LinkedIn, and you’ll see influencer after influencer describing it as “the way” to tackle multi-sheet or multi-file budget rollups.
If you’re an Excel professional looking for guidance, the road signs seem obvious: follow Power Query.
But what if those road signs are pointing in the wrong direction?
Feature-First vs Outcome-First Design
The core problem is one of mindset. Most tutorials, videos, and “best practices” fall into what I call feature-first design:
- You learn a new feature.
- You look for ways to use it.
- Eventually, you apply it everywhere—even in situations where it doesn’t fit.
Outcome-first design is different. It asks:
- What does the business process need?
- What is the outcome we are driving toward?
- Which tool, method, or architecture best achieves that outcome?
When you design from the outcome back, you see clearly that using Power Query to consolidate budgets in an enterprise context introduces two deal-breaking flaws (as we showed in Mission Impossible, Episode Two).
Why Did People Choose the Wrong Road?
When you ask finance teams, “Why did you consolidate budgets this way?” the answer is remarkably consistent:
“Because that’s how I thought it was done. That’s what I kept hearing online. That’s what the experts said.”
In other words, people chose the road because the signs pointed that way.
And who put up those signs? Every major Excel influencer on social media.
Which raises two questions:
- Why did they put up the signs?
- Why are people so quick to follow them?
Why Influencers Pointed to Power Query
When challenged, most influencers admit they didn’t know there was another way. They didn’t know that external links had been obsolete for 30 years. They didn’t know you could design a consolidation model without locking data inside workbooks. They had never worked with ADO, never appreciated the role of Office as a client-server platform, and never considered Excel’s relational database capabilities.
That ignorance matters. If you are positioning yourself as an “Excel expert” but don’t understand how enterprise-grade Excel has been used for decades, then you are—unintentionally or not—misdirecting your audience.
Which brings us to a deeper question: How should we define Excel expertise?
Is expertise knowing every feature? Or is it about achieving outcomes that matter in business?
Why People Followed the Signs
The second issue is buyer beware. Users looking for guidance rarely question the motives or experience of those giving it. They see a highly polished video or a viral post, assume credibility, and follow along.
But we should always ask:
- Who put this sign here?
- What is their agenda?
- Are they qualified to direct me?
- Does this advice apply in my environment—or just in a hobbyist’s private car park?
This distinction matters. Power Query consolidation may be fine for a single analyst working on their own machine. But in an enterprise budgeting process—where dozens of managers must review, approve, and reconcile data across the organization—it fails. Yet almost no influencer makes this context clear.
The Cost of Misapplied Guidance
This is not just an academic debate. A $100 billion software industry has grown on the back of Excel Hell: endless consolidation errors, broken links, and wasted hours caused by inappropriate spreadsheet techniques.
And Power Query consolidation, promoted without context, is a leading contributor.
When techniques designed for the “private car park” are sold as best practice for the “public highway,” disaster follows. Enterprises waste billions on inefficiency, unnecessary software purchases, and missed opportunities for automation—all because they followed the wrong signs.
What Needs to Change
The lesson is not that Power Query is useless. It is excellent for certain isolated tasks. The lesson is that context matters.
- If you are working in a private, isolated workbook, by all means experiment with Power Query.
- But if you are responsible for enterprise-wide budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, you need a different architecture—one that separates data from spreadsheets, leverages databases, and treats Excel as a client, not a silo.
Until the Excel community, and especially its influencers, recognize this distinction, we will continue to see misdirection, wasted resources, and the persistence of “Excel Hell.”
Final Thought
The next time someone tells you, “This is the way to consolidate your budgets in Excel,” pause before following the road sign. Ask yourself:
- Who put this sign here?
- Do they really know the terrain?
- Does this road lead to where I need to go—or just to another dead end?
Because in the enterprise world, following the wrong signs doesn’t just waste your time. It costs organizations billions.
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