By Hiran de Silva
Every few months, the topic of plagiarism resurfaces on LinkedIn — often when one educator recognises their own material being used elsewhere.
Recently, for example, Mynda Treacy publicly addressed a case where a project management tutorial had been repackaged — almost verbatim — from one of her original explainers. It’s a scenario that’s played out many times: well-known educators finding their work effectively duplicated by others who then monetise it without giving credit or compensation.
And of course, Mynda and others have tried to curb that by branding their content or stipulating that any reuse must display their logo.
But the question lingers: does a watermark or logo really prevent someone from using the material for their own gain? And is it always so clear-cut when it comes to what’s truly “copyrightable”?
The Grey Zone Between Inspiration and Plagiarism
In the social media education space, it’s rarely black and white.
A product demonstration — for example, “how to use XLOOKUP” — doesn’t create intellectual property in the same way that an original business process, system design, or case study does. The formula belongs to Microsoft. The demonstration is a service to the community.
But when one person reproduces another’s presentation — word for word, slide for slide — and monetises it, that crosses into appropriation. It’s a practical rather than philosophical issue: who benefits, and who is displaced?
Now imagine a translator recreating that same tutorial for a non-English audience — visually identical, but voiced in their native language. In that case, there’s added educational value: a new group of learners now have access. Yet the original creator may still feel cheated.
So where do we draw the line?
Perhaps the better question is: what are we trying to achieve as educators? Is our mission to protect our clips, or to advance understanding?
The Real Educational Blind Spot
There’s a larger issue lurking beneath all of this — one that most discussions about plagiarism completely miss.
Much of Excel education on social media is not education in the truest sense. It’s product demonstration.
It teaches buttons and ribbons, not principles and frameworks.
That’s why millions of people have watched tutorials on:
- Inventory management with Excel tables
- Cascading drop-downs with Data Validation
- Power Query for importing multiple files
And yet, none of these techniques — however brilliantly taught — can scale to a real enterprise scenario with 20 warehouses and 50 operators.
The reason is simple: they’re demonstrations of tools, not explanations of systems.
What’s missing is the understanding that data should live centrally, and spreadsheets should interact with that data — not contain it.
When the Real World Steps In
Let’s take a concrete example.
Mynda Treacy’s inventory management tutorial is perfectly valid for a single user. It even highlights a key takeaway: that rather than keeping an ever-changing stock list, one should record transactions — goods in, goods out — and let the totals flow from there.
That’s sound principle. But in an enterprise with multiple warehouses and users, storing all data in one workbook breaks down immediately. You need a database at the centre — the digital librarian — and a spreadsheet that simply fetches and saves data to it.
The same applies to cascading drop-downs.
The principle behind them — that one selection filters the next — is perfectly fine. But in most social media tutorials, both lists live in the same workbook. In the real world, you’d need those lists to come from a shared, central source.
And Power Query?
It’s often presented as the go-to way to import data. But for simple, dynamic data retrieval, a single line of ADO code can get the job done faster, cleaner, and without bloat.
So while these techniques are useful, they don’t scale — not because Excel is flawed, but because the principles behind their use are misunderstood.
The Principle vs. the Product
Every tool embodies a principle.
If we teach the tool without the principle, we end up with clever mechanics who can’t fix an engine when it stops.
It’s like the driver who changes four tyres when the car won’t start, not realising the problem is an empty fuel tank.
Or the person who uses a hammer on a screw because they know only that both are “for attaching things to wood.”
Modern Excel users are being trained to swing the hammer harder, not to understand whether it’s the right tool in the first place.
When Critique Is Not “Rubbishing”
When I contrast these mainstream approaches in my own content — such as in the Excel Mission Impossible series — it isn’t to undermine anyone. It’s to clarify the operating range of the technique.
My goal is to show that a method which works beautifully for one-person spreadsheets may collapse entirely in a multi-user enterprise environment.
This isn’t criticism. It’s context.
And it’s essential.
Because without that understanding, millions of learners apply the wrong methods to the wrong problems — and when it fails, they blame Excel itself.
That’s how the myth of “Excel Hell” was born.
A Necessary Comparison
In scientific or academic work, it’s standard to cite the sources you are contrasting with.
You can’t claim to have improved on something unless you reference what it is you’re improving on.
So when influencers object to being mentioned by name, I would argue that it’s precisely because their work is valuable and visible that it must be referenced in any serious comparative study.
If a method is popular and influential, then it shapes how thousands — even millions — think. And if those same methods introduce misconceptions about scalability, collaboration, or architecture, then someone has to correct the record.
To contrast, you must first identify what you’re contrasting with.
The Ironic Twist
If someone were to take my approach tomorrow — the hub-and-spoke architecture, the GET/PUT model, the ADO database bridge — and teach it in another language or with their own examples, I wouldn’t be angry.
In fact, I’d celebrate it. Because it would mean the conversation has finally moved forward.
The real theft, in my view, is not the copying of content but the suppression of principle.
When education stops at “click here,” we rob learners of the ability to think, adapt, and innovate.
Redefining Spreadsheet Risk
Ray Panko’s seminal research on “Spreadsheet Risk” was right for its time.
But the context has changed.
Modern Excel, when used as a client-server system with proper data architecture, doesn’t suffer the same risks of version chaos, overwriting, or formula corruption.
Instead, the new risk is complacency — the comfort of cosmetic understanding that masks enormous missed opportunity.
We now need to redefine spreadsheet risk as the gap between what Excel can do and what most people think it can do.
The Bigger Picture
This brings us back to the plagiarism debate.
If someone duplicates a superficial tutorial, the damage is limited — because the knowledge being copied is already limited.
But when we begin to teach principles, understanding, and architecture, the value multiplies — and with it comes responsibility.
That’s the real challenge of thought leadership: not protecting your diagrams, but advancing the discipline itself.
In Conclusion
Copyright debates are symptoms of a deeper problem: a culture of demonstration without comprehension.
The true challenge isn’t to stop others from copying our tutorials — it’s to teach in a way that makes copying unnecessary.
When we start focusing on principles — on how data flows, how systems connect, and how architecture determines scalability — education becomes self-sustaining.
That’s the difference between showing someone which button to click and teaching them why they’re clicking it.
Because once you understand the principle, you don’t just learn Excel.
You learn how to think.
✅ #ExcelEducation #ThoughtLeadership #DigitalTransformation #Plagiarism #SpreadsheetRisk #DataArchitecture #LearningPrinciples
Add comment