By Hiran de Silva
This article is inspired by a post by Christopher Argent of GenCFO on LinkedIn, and the relevance of Modern Excel features, as mentioned by other contributors.
Here’s an illustration to get this point across.
Imagine we have a few parcels to deliver — 100 miles away.
An Amazon delivery van sets off along the motorway. Ninety minutes later, the job is done. Parcels delivered, customers happy, everything traceable on a central system.
Now picture a gardener with a wheelbarrow.
For gardening, the wheelbarrow is indispensable — efficient, ergonomic, the perfect tool for moving soil, pots, or plants around a garden.
Then someone invents a powered wheelbarrow.
Suddenly it’s even better: it’s motorised, the hopper is bigger, it carries heavier loads, you can add a seat, LED lights, even a cup holder.
Landscape artists love it.
Gardening becomes the newly ascending trend. Millions of new gardneing enthusiasts.
The gardening world explodes with creativity.
Social media influencers are attracted to this new activity in hoards. Some of them never did any gardening before. Or even now!
Social media fills with tutorials, unboxings, and comparisons of different powered wheelbarrows. There are influencers, training courses, and hashtags.
It’s a booming scene — productive, joyful, and profitable.
But here’s the catch:
Despite all this progress, none of those powered wheelbarrows — not the newest, not the fanciest — can deliver those parcels 100 miles away in an hour and a half.
Because the wheelbarrow, however advanced, is still a wheelbarrow.
It’s not built for the motorway.
It was never meant to be.
Part 1 – Why This Analogy Matters
At first glance the comparison sounds absurd.
Why would anyone compare a wheelbarrow to a delivery van?
Because both move things. And the difference between them is not in whether they move, but in how far, how fast, and at what scale.
That distinction — scale, distance, purpose — lies at the heart of what’s happened to Excel over the last 40 years.
Excel has always scaled to Amazon delivery power. But did you get the memo?
Part 2 – A Short History of Excel’s Evolution
Let’s go back to the beginning.
When personal computers first appeared in the 1980s, everything lived inside one machine.
Every business application — accounting, payroll, inventory — was self-contained.
The screens, the reports, the logic, the data — all in a single package.
If HR wanted to send data to Accounting, they printed it out or saved it to a floppy disk and typed it back in.
Nobody complained; that’s just how things were.
Then, around 1990, everything changed.
Windows arrived.
Computers could run more than one application at a time.
Networking arrived.
For the first time, computers could talk to each other.
This created an architectural revolution.
Data could be separated from the programs that used it.
Instead of dozens of isolated copies, a single central database could serve the whole organisation.
Accounting, HR, Sales — all could work from one version of the truth.
Business became faster, cleaner, and less error-prone.
That was the birth of the client–server architecture.
The data lived on a central server; the applications on people’s desks became the clients.
Bill Gates called this the Digital Nervous System — when a change in one place automatically triggered a controlled, intelligent response elsewhere.
That’s what powered the ERP era — Enterprise Resource Planning.
And Microsoft Office was designed to fit that model perfectly.
Access held the data.
Excel, Word, and PowerPoint became intelligent clients that could fetch, refresh, and update that data automatically.
Excel, in that architecture, was not a toy.
It was an enterprise front-end — a participant in the client–server world.
Professionals who understood this (and I was one of them) built entire corporate systems on this principle.
Created value.
That’s your Amazon van.
Fast, connected, enterprise-grade.
It can deliver anywhere on schedule.
Part 3 – The Rise of the Powered Wheelbarrow
But while Excel professionals were driving enterprise vans, the rest of the world was still happily pushing Excel wheelbarrows.
People used Excel for local, manual work:
copying, pasting, emailing files back and forth, consolidating 400 spreadsheets with linked formulas.
When these setups grew, they broke.
A new terminology was born – Excel Hell.
Enterprise Excel specialists already had the cure — centralised data, hub-and-spoke design, client–server thinking — but most casual users never saw it.
Then, about fifteen years ago, came another explosion — just like our gardening boom.
Everyone suddenly had a laptop.
Everyone had Excel.
Everyone wanted to “learn Excel.”
It was the democratisation of computing.
And the tech industry saw an opportunity.
Microsoft and influencers began creating features for this new audience — people working on small, personal projects.
Hence we got the Power suite:
Power Query, Power Pivot, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate.
And within Excel itself: Dynamic Arrays, X LOOKUP, Lambda, Tables — features aimed at making the local, individual spreadsheet faster, smarter, and more exciting.
But that’s still a Local spreadsheet for personal use.
That’s our powered wheelbarrow.
More capacity, more automation, motorised convenience.
Perfect for the backyard.
Perfect for trending content.
And it truly helps people within that narrow, local scope.
Part 4 – But It’s Still Not a Van
Yet, no matter how powerful the wheelbarrow becomes,
no matter how many millions are sold,
no matter how many influencers produce tutorials and challenges about it —
you still can’t deliver a load of parcels 100 miles away in 90 minutes.
Because the architecture hasn’t changed.
It’s still local.
It’s still personal.
It’s still one user, one file, one garden.
That’s what modern Excel does brilliantly.
But it is not — and never will be — a substitute for enterprise-scale, data-driven architecture.
To think otherwise is like believing that by fitting a turbo engine and Wi-Fi into a wheelbarrow, Amazon could run its national logistics network on them.
Part 5 – Why This Confusion Matters
This misunderstanding is not trivial.
It costs organisations millions.
When leaders believe that a modern Excel workbook can replace an enterprise data system, they run into the same wall — version conflicts, duplication, broken links, manual reconciliations, inconsistent logic.
The real tragedy?
The solution already exists inside Excel itself.
It’s the same client–server foundation we have always had in Excel.
Excel + Access / SQL Server (even on the Cloud) = an Amazon van.
You just need to reconnect Excel to its central data source — the digital librarian — and suddenly you have an enterprise nervous system again.
Live data, live updates, one version of the truth, and a spreadsheet front-end everyone already understands.
That’s the upgrade from the wheelbarrow to the van.
Part 6 – The Opportunity
Here lies one of the greatest opportunities in the business world today.
Any professional who can see this distinction — who can say, “Wait, our process doesn’t need a faster wheelbarrow; it needs a van,” — becomes instantly valuable.
One small demonstration — a working prototype where Excel talks to a central database — changes everything.
Colleagues see live data appear, updates flowing both ways, and realise in seconds:
This is what we’ve been missing.
The person who brings that insight — who upgrades the wheelbarrow to a van — becomes the hero of the organisation.
Just as I did, many times, by implementing this simple, lateral shift.
Part 7 – Closing and Punchline
So let’s close where we began.
Gardening is wonderful.
Wheelbarrows are wonderful.
Powered wheelbarrows are even better.
They make life easier for gardeners and inspire a thriving, creative community.
But the next time someone tells you that the latest powered wheelbarrow can replace an Amazon delivery van, smile — because now you know better.
You understand architecture.
You understand scale.
You understand that Excel’s true power doesn’t come from “Power Query” or “Power Pivot,” but from its ability to create the digital librarian – the database backend.
And until that understanding spreads, the world will keep polishing wheelbarrows while the real opportunity — the motorway — lies wide open.
“No matter how powerful the wheelbarrow, and how many millions are talking about them, it will never deliver parcels 100 miles away in 90 minutes.”
— Hiran de Silva
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