By Hiran de Silva
As Microsoft Excel turns 40 this month, it’s remarkable how the world’s most widely used business tool still attracts an endless stream of white papers that seek to undermine it. One such example is Workday Adaptive Planning’s “Nine Circles of Excel Hell”—a document that claims to highlight nine inherent flaws in Excel. (Now slightly renamed, but the message inside is the same)
On the surface, it sounds authoritative. But look closer, and the premise collapses.
The Flawed Premise
This white paper does not describe Excel as it is used by competent professionals. Instead, it lists the mistakes of inexperienced or untrained users and presents them as if they were unavoidable weaknesses of the software itself.
That’s like blaming the car for an accident when the driver has never passed a test.
Imagine a world where most drivers had never been through formal training. On private property, this is perfectly legal—you can drive a car without a license. But place those same drivers on the public highway, and disaster follows. Competence is the difference between chaos and control.
That is exactly what happens in the enterprise with Excel. Unlike driving, there is no universal test of competence for spreadsheet use in business. Untrained staff—through no fault of their own—end up working on mission-critical processes with little more than “car park” skills. The result? Errors, inefficiencies, and frustrations.
But those are not flaws in Excel. They are the predictable outcomes of using a power tool without training.
The Reality: Excel in Professional Hands
In my own live demonstrations, I take each of the nine so-called “circles of hell” and show how they disappear when Excel is in the hands of a trained professional:
- Version control? Solved by implementing Excel’s native client–server model with a central database.
- Manual errors? Eliminated by structured design, validation, and automation.
- Lack of scalability? Addressed by separating data from calculation and presentation layers—a practice Excel was designed to support since the 1990s.
In every case, the “problems” evaporate. What remains is a powerful, flexible, and enterprise-ready tool that rivals—and in many cases, surpasses—expensive FP&A packages.
Why This Matters
The danger of white papers like Workday’s is not merely that they misunderstand Excel. It is that they mislead business leaders, creating a false impression that Excel is inherently broken. This fuels the sales pitch for alternative platforms, while overlooking the fact that Excel—when used properly—already delivers what those platforms promise.
It’s an uneven playing field:
- On one side, we have well-marketed software vendors comparing their polished solutions to the amateur misuse of Excel.
- On the other, we have Excel professionals whose expertise remains largely invisible, despite being the engine room of most enterprises.
The comparison is not fair. It’s like pitting a Formula 1 car driven by a professional against a teenager doing donuts in a car park—and then claiming the teenager’s performance proves the car is defective.
A Call to Action
At 40 years old, Excel deserves better than to be caricatured by lazy marketing. The Excel community—practitioners, trainers, consultants, and leaders—should confront this narrative head-on.
Workday Adaptive Planning’s “Nine Circles of Excel Hell” is not just misleading. It is misinformation. It should be corrected, withdrawn, or replaced with an honest statement of regret.
More broadly, we should challenge the industry to raise the conversation. The real issue is not Excel’s capability—it is the widespread lack of competency frameworks, training, and professional standards for its use in enterprise contexts.
Let’s celebrate Excel at 40 not by recycling myths, but by acknowledging what it truly is:
- The most universal enterprise tool in history.
- A platform that scales when used with professional competence.
- A foundation for innovation, not a scapegoat for incompetence.
It’s time we stopped accepting these flawed comparisons. Excel isn’t in “hell.” It’s still the backbone of business—and it deserves to be recognized as such.
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