By Hiran de Silva
1. Is there any real, independent research on the ‘alternative to Excel’ industry?
Yes — mostly from three places:
- FP&A Trends (finance planning and analysis surveys),
- AFP (Association for Financial Professionals benchmarking),
- and BARC (a European analyst firm that surveys people using planning tools like Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, etc.). (fpa-trends.com)
What those surveys are doing is asking finance teams questions like:
- “What tool do you actually use to plan?”
- “Are you happy?”
- “How much time are you spending fixing data instead of doing analysis?”
Here’s the headline that keeps repeating:
Even in 2024 and 2025, Excel is still the dominant planning tool inside companies.
For example:
- The FP&A Trends Survey says Excel is still the primary planning tool for roughly half of organisations globally — 52% in 2024, and 45% still in 2025. Only about 1 in 5 organisations (21%) say their main planning environment is a modern cloud FP&A platform. (fpa-trends.com)
- The Association for Financial Professionals’ 2025 benchmarking data says it even more bluntly: 99% of FP&A teams still use spreadsheets at least monthly for planning, and essentially 100% still use spreadsheets for reporting. Spreadsheets are described as “the least common denominator” connecting all the other systems. (AFP)
So in terms of actual usage, the claim “the industry has moved beyond spreadsheets” is not supported by the data. Spreadsheets are still everywhere, including in companies that already bought Anaplan, Workday Adaptive, Planful, etc. (fpa-trends.com)
There’s another interesting data point: Gartner and finance media keep forecasting that spreadsheets are about to die. You’ll hear lines like “By 2026, over 70 percent of finance organisations will have moved away from spreadsheets as their primary planning tool.” That statement is literally being used in 2025 sales material for FP&A platforms. (The CFO)
Notice the tense. “By 2026, will have moved.” That’s a prediction. It’s not what’s happening today. Right now, in 2025, spreadsheets are still universal in FP&A. (AFP)
2. Do tools like Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, Planful, and Datarails actually eliminate spreadsheets like they claim?
Short version: No. Not in practice. The marketing message is “no more Excel.” The lived reality is “the system plus a lot of Excel around it.”
Let’s take Workday Adaptive Planning. Their entire sales story is built on what they call “Nine Circles of Spreadsheet Hell,” which says spreadsheets cause chaos, version risk, broken links, fragile formulas, and so on. The pitch is: “Move into Adaptive Planning and escape spreadsheet hell.” (forms.workday.com)
Anaplan’s pitch is similar. They talk about “connected planning” and “one model of the truth,” and they position Excel as local, manual, uncontrolled. The implication is: serious companies shouldn’t be doing planning in Excel anymore. (help.anaplan.com)
But now here’s the twist.
Anaplan ships and actively supports an Excel add-in that lets finance users:
- Connect a worksheet directly to Anaplan data,
- Pull numbers from the Anaplan model into Excel,
- And (in current versions) even send changes back from Excel into Anaplan for certain models. So, literally edit the plan from Excel. (help.anaplan.com)
Why would they build that if spreadsheets were really “hell” and truly obsolete?
Answer: because stakeholders still insist on working in Excel. They do not all want to live inside the web interface of a planning platform. They want to download the numbers, tweak them, try “their version,” and circulate a spreadsheet to their team.
Workday Adaptive Planning actually acknowledges this too. Their own collateral says you can collaborate “from anywhere — by web, mobile, and Microsoft Excel.” In other words, the Excel surface is still part of their official story. (forms.workday.com)
So the platforms publicly say, “ditch spreadsheets,” and privately say, “okay, we’ll integrate with your spreadsheets so you’ll keep using them, but now we’ll call it ‘controlled.’”
3. Do these FP&A platforms sometimes increase spreadsheet work instead of reducing it?
Yes. And this is one of the most under-discussed problems.
There are three structural reasons:
Reason 1. Licensing and access.
Not everyone in the company gets a licence to Anaplan, Adaptive, or Planful. So what happens in real life is: FP&A exports “the official view” into Excel, or uses the Excel add-in to pull down the latest numbers, and sends that spreadsheet to department heads who aren’t licensed. Those department heads then play with it in Excel, offline, and send it back. Now finance has to reconcile that back into the “single source of truth.” The result? More spreadsheets. Not fewer. (help.anaplan.com)
Reason 2. Local scenario modelling.
Budget owners and execs almost always want to run “their own scenario” quietly before committing it to the master system. They are not going to wait for an FP&A admin to build a new version in Anaplan. They will copy numbers into Excel, do what-if locally, and then negotiate. FP&A Trends says only a minority of organisations can actually run driver-based scenarios fast, on demand. In fact, many companies still take days to build a scenario, and more than 20 percent admit they can’t run scenarios at all. That gap drives people straight back to ad-hoc Excel modelling. (fpa-trends.com)
Reason 3. Manual data wrangling is still there.
Despite years of selling “automation,” finance teams in 2025 are still spending huge chunks of time just collecting, cleaning, and reconciling data. FP&A Trends and AFP both describe this same pain:
- Finance teams still burn 40–50 percent of their FP&A time on low-value manual work like gathering data and validating numbers across systems.
- Only about 2 percent of teams describe their planning process as truly “optimised.” The rest are still stitching systems together by hand. (fpa-trends.com)
That tells us something important:
Even after you buy the “Excel replacement,” you’re still reconciling data manually, and Excel is still the glue.
In other words, the promise was “less spreadsheet work.” The result, in many cases, is “spreadsheet work plus platform work.”
4. Are customers walking away from these platforms and going back to Excel?
No vendor will publish “we lost X percent of customers who went back to Excel,” so we have to read signals.
Signal 1. Public marketing from Excel-friendly vendors.
Vena, a vendor that brands itself as “Excel-native FP&A,” openly markets this claim: something like “80% of companies who implement corporate performance management software end up turning back to Excel at some point.” They also say bluntly that 70 percent of companies rely on spreadsheets to run the business. They frame that as proof that finance will not abandon spreadsheets no matter what software gets bought. (venasolutions.com)
Now, Vena is obviously selling against pure “Excel replacement” platforms. So yes, that’s commercial spin. But the fact they feel confident using that number in public tells you it resonates with finance leaders because it feels true.
Signal 2. Universal fallback.
AFP’s 2025 benchmarking summary says spreadsheets are still used at least monthly by 99 percent of FP&A respondents for planning, and by 100 percent for reporting. The report literally calls spreadsheets “the least common denominator” that connects data across the other systems. Translation: even after you’ve bought a planning platform, Excel is still the safety net and still the final reporting surface. (Studocu)
Signal 3. Implementation pain.
There are recurring stories in finance forums and customer reviews that the rollout of a tool like Adaptive Planning or Anaplan takes far longer than promised, and that teams basically have to build the model in Excel first, then rebuild it again in the platform. That means for at least one entire budget cycle, you are doing double work and still relying on Excel daily. (Reddit)
Put simply: it’s common to see a company “buy the platform,” live in it a bit, then drift right back to Excel for day-to-day agility, and keep the platform mainly as a data repository or a board-pack generator. That is functionally “going back to Excel,” even if the subscription is technically still active. (Studocu)
5. Does any of the available evidence support your theory?
Your theory, stated plainly, is:
“Excel is not the real problem. The real problem is that Excel is being used and taught in a way that is not fit for enterprise work. People are building hundreds of disconnected local spreadsheets instead of using Excel as a governed client sitting on top of a central, trusted data model.”
There is growing evidence that this is true.
First sign: the tone of the anti-Excel marketing is changing.
A few years ago, the Workday Adaptive message was: “Spreadsheets are hell. Get rid of them.” (forms.workday.com)
In 2025, the message from finance software vendors has quietly shifted to:
“Keep Excel, but plug it into us so it’s controlled, audited, centralised.”
- Anaplan is now openly promoting the fact you can read and write model data directly from Excel using their official Excel Add-in. That is literally Excel as the interface and Anaplan as the data engine. (help.anaplan.com)
- Workday Adaptive Planning’s own material says collaboration can happen “by web, mobile, and Microsoft Excel,” which is effectively an admission that Excel remains a primary working surface. (forms.workday.com)
- Newer players like Cube sell themselves not as “leave Excel,” but as “spreadsheet-native FP&A.” Their pitch is: stay in Excel and Google Sheets, but get a governed, centralised database behind it that handles consolidation, mapping, integrations, audit, version control, and scenario tracking. (cubesoftware.com)
- Datarails positions itself the same way for finance teams: keep Excel, we’ll automate consolidation and reporting around it. That is literally “Excel plus a hub,” not “Excel is dead.” (Coefficient)
That marketing pivot from “kill Excel” to “govern Excel” essentially confirms your point:
The limitation was never “Excel cannot do enterprise.”
The limitation was “the way Excel is deployed is chaotic.”
Second sign: what finance teams say they actually need.
FP&A Trends, 2024–2025, keeps repeating this: most finance teams’ biggest pain is fragmented data, manual consolidation, version confusion, and slow scenario modelling. Only about 17–22 percent of organisations can run a scenario in under a day. Many organisations literally cannot run scenarios on demand at all. (fpa-trends.com)
Notice what’s missing.
Nobody in those surveys says, “our problem is we love Excel too much.”
They say, “our problem is we don’t have a unified data backbone and we waste time stitching data together.”
That is exactly the thing you solve with your ‘Digital Librarian’ model:
- A central, trusted, relational data store (the “librarian”), living outside any one spreadsheet.
- Excel workbooks act as clients: they GET from that shared source and PUT back into that shared source.
- No external links spiderwebbing across 200 local budget files.
- No Power Query model trapped inside one analyst’s workbook where nobody else can update it.
That’s Excel treated like a proper front end to shared data — not Excel as hundreds of private silos.
So yes. The public research and the way the vendors are now talking about Excel both support your theory:
The real blocker is not “Excel can’t scale.”
It’s “we never taught Excel users to work with a governed, central data model.” (forms.workday.com)
6. The big commercial question:
What happens if CFOs and FP&A leaders realise that the advantages sold by Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, Planful, etc… can actually be delivered using Excel itself plus a central governed data layer?
Let’s list the promises these vendors make:
- “Single source of truth.”
- “No more emailing 400 spreadsheets around.”
- “Security, audit trail, approvals.”
- “Scenario modelling and forecasting that runs fast.”
- “Board-ready reporting in minutes, not weeks.”
Now compare that to what the vendors are quietly doing:
- Anaplan: “Here’s our two-way Excel add-in so you can keep using Excel but still write back into the central model.” That is literally Excel as the planning interface and Anaplan as the governed database. (help.anaplan.com)
- Cube, Datarails, Vena: “We are spreadsheet-native. You stay in Excel. We become the governed data hub behind the scenes.” (cubesoftware.com)
- Even Workday Adaptive Planning, in its own messaging, now admits Excel is still part of the collaboration surface. (forms.workday.com)
In other words, the market is already drifting toward the thing you’re describing:
Excel as the window.
A central data model as the warehouse.
Live two-way data flow instead of fragile external links.
If finance leadership really internalises that:
- The “ditch Excel” message becomes a lot less persuasive, because Excel is obviously not going away in practice. (AFP)
- The cost model of big FP&A platforms starts to look bloated, because a lot of what they sell — centralised data, controlled write-back, auditability — can be architected using Excel as the front end and a relational data store at the centre, without forcing everyone into a whole new UI. (cubesoftware.com)
- The status of the Excel power user flips from “risky cowboy who builds fragile spreadsheets” to “critical systems architect who can connect workbooks cleanly into a governed data backbone.” That is a political earthquake inside finance teams.
This last point is dangerous for the “alternative to Excel” industry, because it reframes the story:
It’s no longer “Excel versus the modern platform.”
It becomes “Excel plus a proper central model, versus the modern platform that eventually ends up feeding Excel anyway.”
And we know from AFP 2025 that finance teams end up in Excel anyway. Virtually all of them. (AFP)
Summary
- Independent surveys in 2024 and 2025 keep reporting that Excel is still the main planning tool for a huge share of organisations (45–52%), and literally 99%+ of FP&A teams still use spreadsheets even if they’ve bought cloud FP&A tools. (fpa-trends.com)
- The “Excel is hell” story from vendors like Workday Adaptive Planning is still loud, but those same vendors now quietly ship Excel integrations or even explicitly endorse Excel as a front end. That’s an admission that finance refuses to abandon spreadsheets. (forms.workday.com)
- In practice, rolling out tools like Anaplan / Adaptive often means more work in Excel in the short term (to design and stage models) and ongoing Excel work in the long term (for scenario tweaks, offline what-ifs, and distribution to people who don’t have a licence). So spreadsheet usage often goes up, not down. (Reddit)
- There is strong indirect evidence of buyer regret. You can see it in marketing claims like “80% of companies who tried CPM software turned back to Excel,” and in the fact that spreadsheets are still described as the universal fallback system for planning and reporting in 2025. (venasolutions.com)
- Your theory — “Excel is not the real problem; bad deployment is the problem” — is now being validated in the open. The hottest positioning in FP&A software right now is “spreadsheet-native.” That is literally your Digital Librarian architecture: Excel as the interface, central governed data behind it, two-way controlled data flow. (cubesoftware.com)
That last point is the killer.
Because if finance leaders realise they can get the benefits they were promised — single source of truth, fast consolidation, auditable write-back, scenario agility — without giving up Excel, then the “alternative to Excel” sales story collapses from “you must replace spreadsheets” to “actually, spreadsheets are the interface… we just need to wire them properly.”
Add comment