Not Wrong — But Already Superseded
By Hiran de Silva
For over two decades, the same five criticisms of Excel have been repeated in enterprise contexts:
- Scalability
- Reach
- Collaboration
- Consolidation
- Connected processes
They appear in vendor white papers (eg. ‘Nine Circles of Excel Hell’), conference talks, and increasingly on social media.
Most recently, they appeared again—almost verbatim—in comments and posts by respected members of the Excel community, including Richard Nero, and earlier in a Global Excel Summit presentation by Gašper Kamenšek.
The conclusion usually drawn is familiar:
“Excel has these limitations at enterprise scale. Therefore, you should be looking at other platforms.”
This article explains—calmly and with evidence—why that conclusion is false.
Not because Power Query is useless.
But because the problem it solves had already been solved in Excel long before Power Query existed.
Where the Argument Starts (and Why It Sounds Convincing)
Power Query’s biggest selling point is clear and undisputed:
The data model.
Power Query allows users to:
- Import large datasets
- Shape and transform them
- Create clean analytical models
This has been genuinely transformative for individual analysts and single-workbook workflows. The explosion of Power Query content on social media proves that.
But here is the critical, often unspoken constraint:
Power Query’s data model lives inside a workbook.
That single architectural fact defines its ceiling.
The Enterprise Limitation No One Mentions
When the data model is embedded inside a workbook:
- One workbook = one model
- One user = one working copy
- Collaboration = passing files around
- Scaling = copying logic, not centralising it
Ironically, these are exactly the weaknesses that Excel is accused of at enterprise scale.
So Power Query ends up being used to make work inside the spreadsheet box more efficient—
without questioning whether that box should exist at all.
The Missing Piece: Excel’s External Data Model
Here is the part that almost never appears in influencer discourse:
Excel has been able to create and work with external, shared, relational data models for decades.
Long before:
- Power Query
- Power Pivot
- “Modern Excel” branding
Excel already supported:
- Central relational databases (Access / SQL Server)
- Shared data models outside workbooks
- True client–server architecture
- Live GET / PUT workflows
- True multi-user collaboration without file sharing
- End-to-end connected business processes
When Excel is designed this way, every single enterprise criticism disappears:
| Alleged Excel Limitation | External Data Model Reality |
|---|---|
| Not scalable | Scales to thousands of entities |
| No collaboration | Multi-user by design |
| No consolidation | Centralised by definition |
| Poor reach | Global access, inc. ISS! |
| Disconnected processes | Fully integrated workflows |
These are not theoretical claims.
They are observable in real, audited enterprise systems—some of them built long before Power Query existed.
The Purple Square vs the Spray Gun
This is where the misunderstanding becomes clear.
Power Query is about painting more efficiently inside the purple square.
But Excel already had a spray gun.
If the spray gun exists:
- Optimising brush strokes inside the square becomes irrelevant
- Productivity gains are local, not systemic
- Effort is spent improving a constraint that no longer needs to exist
So when Power Query is presented as an enterprise breakthrough, the correct response should not be disbelief—it’s ‘show mw’.
“But Power Query Is Used Widely in Enterprises…”
Absolutely.
And so were spreadsheets emailed around the world in the 1990s.
Widespread usage does not mean architectural optimality.
It usually means the better alternative was never widely known.
Power Query thrives precisely where ignorance of Enterprise Excel exists:
- External data models were never shown
- Relational thinking was never taught
- Excel was framed as “just a spreadsheet”
Why Power Query Exists (The Marketing Angle)
This is the uncomfortable part—but it matters.
Power Query was introduced into a market where:
- Millions of Excel users had never seen Excel in professional enterprise workflow
- Influencers were unaware of enterprise spreadsheet architecture
- There was enormous appetite for “new power” inside the familiar box
That is a perfect marketing environment.
The influencer community didn’t just adopt Power Query as their champion.
It created the market for it.
Not out of bad faith—out of incomplete information.
The Diplomatic Conclusion
This is not an attack on Power Query.
Nor on the people who teach it.
Power Query is:
- Useful
- Clever
- Powerful within its architectural boundary
But in the enterprise context, it is not the next step forward.
It is a step backwards, taken because the forward path was never revealed.
Power Query in Excel in the enterprise is not obsolete because it fails.
It is obsolete because Excel had already solved the enterprise problem—quietly, years earlier.
Final Thought
If the challenge is enterprise Excel:
- The answer is not better tools inside the workbook
- The answer is moving the data model outside it
That capability has been hiding in plain sight all along.
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