By Hiran de Silva
This was one of my very first posts on LinkedIn. About ten years ago.
What do we mean by Advanced Excel?
Every Excel learner eventually hits a paradox.
They begin by thinking that mastery of Excel comes from knowing more formulas, more features, and more shortcuts. They search for tutorials, subscribe to influencers, binge through YouTube videos. And the message they receive is remarkably consistent:
If you want to get better at Excel, learn more Excel.
But what if the opposite is true?
What if the real jump in value — the jump that transforms a £40k analyst into a £120k enterprise problem-solver — has nothing to do with mastering more formulas at all?
What if the most powerful Excel is the most basic Excel?
To understand this, we must examine four terms that the Excel community uses loosely but almost never defines:
Beginner Excel
Basic Excel
Advanced Excel
Enterprise Excel
These words are thrown around constantly, but their meanings shift depending on who is talking. Let’s define them properly — and then show why the real breakthrough comes from seeing the world differently, not from memorising another function.
1. Beginner Excel — Inside the Box
A complete novice sees Excel through a tiny window:
- A handful of cells
- A single sheet
- A single file
- A single task
The mindset is local. Everything happens inside the box — inside one workbook, on one machine, for one purpose.
Beginner Excel lives here because beginners lack:
- Context
- Experience
- Understanding of the business problem
- Awareness of the wider system of which their spreadsheet is only a tiny part
This world is defined by purple squares — simple, tightly bounded tasks.
And for this audience, anything that looks visually clever on a YouTube screen recording feels “advanced.”
2. Advanced Excel — The Playground of Social Media
To a beginner, “advanced” Excel is whatever produces spectacle:
- Flashy formulas
- Clever mouse tricks
- Dynamic arrays blooming across the screen
- Filters sliding with a click
- Power Query’s colourful screens
- Power Pivot diagrams with relationships
- LAMBDA
- A fancy dashboard with gradients and icons
This content is perfect for social media:
high-engagement, high-wow-factor, low-business-value.
It is essentially entertainment.
These features are extremely useful in the right place, but they are often presented as the pathway to progress.
For the novice who lives inside the purple square, this looks like the natural direction of travel.
But this path has a ceiling — a very low one.
Because none of these features were designed to solve enterprise problems like:
- Collaboration
- Consolidation
- Scalability
- Version control
- Auditability
- Enterprise “reach”
- Hundreds of users
- Thousands of data sets
- Millions of transactions
In other words, “advanced” Excel is advanced only to beginners.
To management, this level is still amateur.
3. Enterprise Excel — The Spray Gun Thinking Shift
At some point, a minority of analysts experience a breakthrough.
They stop thinking like spreadsheet users.
They begin thinking like their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses.
And when they do, they leave the world of purple squares behind entirely.
Here comes the spray gun.
Instead of:
- individually painting each purple square
- building complex models inside a single workbook
- wrestling with huge formulas
- stitching together fragile sheets
They realise that the problem is architectural, not technical.
What the business needs is:
- Centralised data
- Distributed templates
- Clear separation between data and logic
- Automated consolidation
- Instant retrieval
- Real-time visibility
- One source of truth
- 100% checker-proof models
- Scale
This is the moment they discover the Digital Librarian —
the central database that stores everything.
And Excel becomes what it was always capable of being:
A lightweight, universal client in a client-server architecture.
It Gets data.
It Puts data.
That’s it.
Two buttons.
No purple squares.
No seven-nested formulas.
No Power Query spaghetti.
No 60-minute screen recorded tutorials.
In enterprise Excel, the spreadsheet stops being a container
and becomes a window.
4. Basic Excel — The Ultimate Irony
Now for the twist — the irony that shocks everyone:
Enterprise-level Excel — the Excel that outperforms £100M FP&A tools —
is built using BASIC Excel.
Not Power Query.
Not Power Pivot.
Not XLOOKUP.
Not Dynamic Arrays.
Not INDEX-MATCH-MATCH-SORT-UNIQUE-FILTER-LAMBDA-FIELDS-PARAMETERS-ETC.
Instead:
- A few simple tables
- A few buttons
- A few lines of VBA
- A simple Get
- A simple Put
The power doesn’t come from complexity.
It comes from using the right mechanism for the job.
A spray gun, not a paintbrush.
An engine, not a pedal bicycle.
A relational database, not a stack of worksheets.
This is the point where analysts realise:
The most advanced Excel in the world is actually the most basic Excel, used correctly, in the right architecture.
Why This Framework Matters
Because if we don’t define these four categories, here’s what happens:
- Beginners think “advanced” Excel will get them promoted.
- Influencers teach techniques that are impressive on video but useless at scale.
- The Excel replacement industry says “Excel cannot scale.”
- Managers believe they need multimillion-pound systems.
- Businesses lock themselves into 12-month cloud migrations.
While the truth sits quietly in the corner:
Excel can scale — spectacularly — when used with the spray-gun mindset.
And it does so using basic Excel.
The Final Message
Before we talk about Get and Put…
Before we talk about the Digital Librarian…
Before we talk about client-server architecture…
We should ask one simple question:
What do you think “basic,” “beginner,” “advanced,” and “enterprise” Excel actually mean?
Because the answer reveals everything:
- Beginners work inside the box.
- Advanced users decorate the box.
- Enterprise thinkers realise the box is the problem.
- And basic Excel — applied with architectural thinking — builds systems that outperform £100B worth of “Excel replacement” tools.
When your thinking shifts from purple squares to the spray gun,
you leave the world of features behind
and enter the world of value creation.
And that, ultimately, is where careers take off.
Where pay triples.
Where impossible projects become trivial.
Where Excel stops being a tool
and becomes an engine.
Watch the demos!
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