By Hiran de Silva
This is a follow up (Part 2), inspired by Md Ismail Hosen’s post on LinkedIn about BS on social media posts. (Part 1)
Imagine you run a shop. On the shelves are high-end mobile phones worth $1,000. People come into the shop because they want a mobile phone.
But you’ve decided that mobile phones are too complicated to sell. They take too long to explain. Customers might lose patience if you tried.
So instead, you offer them a $10 box of chocolates at the counter. You tell yourself, “This is what people want—something quick, affordable, and easy.”
The customer walks out of the shop clutching a box of chocolates. The tragedy is that they believe they’ve bought a mobile phone.
Why? Because they don’t know the difference. They don’t yet have the knowledge to tell chocolates from phones.
This is what happens when Excel education is reduced to five-minute social media videos.
- To truly understand a new Excel feature, the learner needs context: where does this fit into enterprise processes?
- They need background knowledge: what came before, what’s around it, what’s possible beyond the demo?
- They need alternatives: is this the only way, or just one way?
- And they need clarity on audience: is this for a novice, an analyst, or someone running global consolidations?
Without that, they get the equivalent of chocolates instead of phones—sweet, quick, easy, but not what they came for.
Here’s the real kicker:
Do influencers realise this? That a five-minute video cannot give the customer the education they actually need?
Or do they take the view that 5,000 people buying $10 chocolates is better than one person buying a $1,000 mobile phone?
And worse, are they relying on the fact that most of those 5,000 viewers cannot tell the difference between a chocolate box and a mobile phone?
That’s why so much Excel content online contributes to confused truth. It looks like education, but it’s actually engagement.
And until we start helping people tell the difference, they will keep walking out of the shop convinced they’re holding a mobile phone—when in fact, it’s just a box of chocolates.
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