By Hiran de Silva
The current wave of social media commentary—whether voiced by Lily Cooper, Frank Custers, or Christopher T Fennell—captures a widespread but deeply flawed sentiment about Excel and its role in the enterprise.
- Lily Cooper frames Excel as fit only for small tasks, while ERP systems should handle the “serious” work. Yet she overlooks a simple truth: spreadsheets proliferated precisely because ERP systems left critical gaps. The “pipes in the desert” remain broken, and Excel became the practical, affordable “human chain with buckets” that allowed businesses to function. To dismiss Excel’s role is to ignore the very reason it exists.
- Frank Custers points to version control and collaboration failures as Excel’s fatal flaws. But these are not Excel limitations—they are architectural ones. When you apply the client/server model, with centralised data and Excel as the interface, those shortcomings vanish.
- Christopher T Fennell compounds the confusion by spreading misinformation: championing Power Query as an enterprise consolidation tool and simultaneously denouncing Access as irrelevant. This not only shows a lack of appreciation for Excel’s client/server heritage, but also promotes a regression—taking collaborative processes backwards into batch-only silos.
Taken together, these voices illustrate the miseducation problem. The real issue is not Excel, nor even ERP, but the absence of understanding about client/server architecture (aka. Hub-and-Spoke or The Digital Librarian)—the very principle that transformed IT 30 years ago and still underpins every enterprise system today. Excel is designed to participate in that architecture. Its agility, affordability, and accessibility make it uniquely suited to bridge the “broken pipes” that ERP implementations, with their 70% failure rate, cannot fix.
As someone who has pioneered these solutions in industry for over a decade, I can testify that these problems—and the misconceptions around them—are universal. I have solved them repeatedly in real organisations, at scale, using the same core principle: separate the data, store it centrally, and use Excel as the flexible client.
This is not theory. It is lived practice.
The next step is to demonstrate this concretely. That is why I present the Budget Review Demonstration Model. It shows, in action, how Excel—properly architected—overcomes the very objections raised by Lily Cooper, Frank Custer, and Christopher T Fennell. It proves that Excel, far from being “small-scale only,” can deliver exactly what ERP and FP&A vendors promise—only faster, more flexibly, and at a fraction of the cost.
And it exposes the truth: the real barrier is not Excel’s capability, but misinformation and miseducation.
— Hiran de Silva, Pioneer of Enterprise Excel
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