By Hiran de Silva
There are two powerful business models operating in the Excel universe today.
Both are vibrant. Both are profitable.
Yet neither tells the full story.
A third — far more transformative — opportunity is emerging quietly beneath them.
One that has the potential to disrupt both.
1. The First Business Model: The Excel Replacement Industry
For more than 25 years, a massive ecosystem has flourished around one message:
“Excel is risky, limited, and unsuitable for serious enterprise work.”
This is the Excel Replacement Industry — a sector now worth more than $100 billion, led by names like Workday Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, and dozens of others. Its white papers and webinars paint a familiar picture: messy spreadsheets, errors in formulas, broken links, and chaotic consolidations. The shorthand for this narrative is Excel Hell.
It’s an easy sell — especially to business leaders who have suffered through genuine spreadsheet chaos.
But what’s less discussed is why this industry arose in the first place.
By the late 1990s, PCs were on every desk. Excel became ubiquitous — but the user base shifted from professionals to novices. Spreadsheet practices created by beginners became the norm, and management, seeing only the visible chaos, concluded that Excel itself was the problem.
When the cloud arrived in the 2000s, vendors seized the moment. They offered salvation in the form of cloud-based enterprise planning tools. The pitch was simple and seductive:
“Leave behind Excel Hell. Migrate to our system.”
And so, a lucrative new market was born.
2. The Second Business Model: The Social-Media Excel Industry
Running parallel to this is a very different ecosystem — one that doesn’t sell software, but attention.
This is the social-media Excel industry: YouTube tutorials, LinkedIn posts, influencer courses, and feature demos. Its audience is the ever-renewing population of casual, hobbyist, or entry-level users who see Excel as a digital sheet of paper.
Microsoft, recognising the viral potential, leaned into this trend by releasing visually engaging “modern Excel” features: Power Query, Dynamic Arrays, XLOOKUP, and more. These innovations are technically impressive — but socially even more powerful. They feed the content economy. Thousands of creators now compete to showcase tricks, tips, and “modern Excel magic.”
This industry thrives on buzz, not business outcomes.
It trains millions of users on the features of Excel — but it doesn’t teach how to address enterprise challenges.
3. The Coexistence Paradox
One might expect these two industries to collide. After all, one demonises Excel, while the other celebrates it.
Yet they coexist — even reinforce each other.
The social-media Excel ecosystem unintentionally supplies the replacement vendors with ammunition: endless visible examples of disorganised, spreadsheet-driven chaos. Every viral Power Query demo that collapses under real-world load, every workbook that can’t consolidate live data, strengthens the narrative that “Excel doesn’t scale.”
Meanwhile, the influencers themselves remain blissfully unaffected.
Their content serves a huge audience of novices, not decision-makers. Their world is likes and views, not group budgets or audit trails. Not solutions that scale and last robustly into the future.
This uneasy truce has held for years. But it is now being challenged.
4. The Third Model: The Digital Librarian Revolution
A new opportunity is emerging — one that quietly disrupts both.
It’s the rediscovery of what Excel was truly built for:
Client-server architecture. Hub-and-spoke design. Database-driven collaboration.
When used professionally — in the way it was originally intended — Excel can outperform many of the enterprise tools that claim to replace it. It can consolidate hundreds of operating units in seconds. It can support live collaboration across regions. It can deliver management-grade reporting at a fraction of the cost.
This isn’t theory. It’s demonstrable fact.
In my own consulting career, I’ve implemented such systems repeatedly — from WSP to Informa, from global consolidations to audit systems — each time tripling my pay and transforming broken spreadsheet networks into live, controlled enterprise platforms. These solutions required no external tools. Just Excel, Access (the quiet database inside Office), and a few lines of SQL.
The architecture I call The Digital Librarian or Hub-and-Spoke Excel is simple:
- Excel is the client.
- Access or SQL Server is the librarian — the central data repository.
- ADO and VBA are the messengers.
This model delivers what the $100 Billion industry promises — but without the $100 Billion .
5. Why This Revolution Stayed Hidden
Three reasons kept this knowledge underground:
- Non-disclosure constraints. Enterprise Excel professionals operate under confidentiality.
- Commercial protection. Their methods are proprietary and represent competitive advantage.
- Visibility gap. They aren’t social-media influencers — they’re working consultants, not content creators seeking likes and clicks.
Until recently, these methods could only be learned through direct mentorship or formal training.
But AI has changed that.
6. AI and the Rise of “Vibe Coding”
What once required programming literacy can now be generated interactively through AI.
You no longer need to write VBA or SQL — you can shape it conversationally.
This new method — popularly called Vibe Coding — requires three things:
- Clarity of intent (know what outcome you want),
- Clear expression (state it precisely),
- Iterative refinement (engage in feedback).
The result: any motivated analyst or consultant can now build an enterprise-grade hub-and-spoke system using plain Excel, guided by AI.
The barrier between “citizen user” and “enterprise architect” has disappeared.
7. The Proof: Budget Consolidation in One Minute
The best way to silence decades of Excel demonisation is simple: show it working.
My one-minute demonstration consolidates 400 operating units across four management levels — instantly, from anywhere in the world. No manual copy-paste. No external links. No Power Query batches. One click: Put. Another:Get.
Real-time, relational, scalable.
This single demo demolishes both prevailing narratives:
- It proves the Excel Replacement Industry wrong: spreadsheets can consolidate and collaborate globally.
- It exposes the limitations of Modern Excel tutorials: Power Query models are batch, not live.
The difference isn’t cosmetic — it’s architectural.
8. The Disruption and the Delicacy
True disruption rarely comes from confrontation; it comes from clarity.
This third model — the Digital Librarian — is disruptive precisely because it dissolves the false divide between “Excel Hell” and “modern Excel.” It restores Excel to its rightful place as a universal enterprise platform, not a toy nor a scapegoat.
But any disruption invites resistance:
- The $100 Billion vendors will push back — often innocently, because their own staff were never trained to know Excel could do this.
- The influencer community may feel threatened — because their expertise sits within the narrow “sheet of paper” paradigm.
That’s why this message must be delivered with precision, diplomacy, and evidence.
9. The Call to Action
The world doesn’t need more Excel features or more anti-Excel campaigns.
It needs more understanding.
The next decade belongs to those who can bridge the gap between popular Excel and professional Excel — those who can think architecturally, design relationally, and automate responsibly.
I invite you to witness the demonstration — and to experience the miracle of Excel for yourself.
What you’ll see in one minute could change how you think about enterprise systems forever.
Excel doesn’t need replacing. It needs understanding, properly.
That’s the miracle — and the disruption — of Excel.
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