The Whisper Around Excel Nobody Wants to Hear

Bu Hiran de Silva

Ask anyone what they do in Excel regularly — daily, weekly, monthly — and you’ll hear familiar tasks: updating reports, reconciling accounts, preparing dashboards.

Then ask a second question: how much of that is intellectual work, and how much is mechanical?

The honest answer, though people hesitate to admit it, is that the majority is mechanical. Copying, pasting, refreshing, formatting, tidying — often repeated the same way every cycle.

Now comes the uncomfortable part.
If it’s mechanical, why can’t it be automated?

Why couldn’t the intellectual part — the logic, the process, the “if this, then that” — also be captured once, and replayed automatically? Why couldn’t the whole thing be re-engineered so it simply happens?

At this point, most people freeze. Eyes flicker, nervous laughter surfaces. Eventually, the answer slips out — usually in a whisper:

“I’m sure there must be people who have the skills to do that… but I hope nobody like that comes here.”

Because here’s the paradox: the more mechanical the work, the more threatened people feel by the possibility of automation. Yet the same people will complain that they’re overworked, stuck in spreadsheet drudgery, unable to focus on the higher-value insights.

So let me turn the question directly to you.

👉 What if you were that person? The one who can see how to automate the mechanics and capture the logic?

Would your colleagues resent you? Maybe. At first.
Would your manager notice? Almost certainly.
Would your career progress? Undoubtedly — because organisations desperately need people who can lift work out of repetition and into systems that run unattended.

Here’s the irony: the real scarcity today isn’t mechanical labour. It’s people who can think about processes, capture them once, and then let Excel (or the database behind it) do the heavy lifting.

So the next time you find yourself repeating a task for the tenth time, stop and ask:

• Is this mechanical or intellectual?
• Could either part be automated?
• What if I were the person who set it free?

Because in that moment lies a choice: to remain the operator of the machine, or to become the engineer who designs how the machine runs.

And careers are made on that distinction.