There is something deeply paradoxical happening in the world of Excel.
On the one hand, we have an enormous and highly successful Excel ecosystem.
Excel influencers.
Training providers.
Microsoft engineers.
MVPs.
YouTube educators.
Paid courses. Free courses. Endless demonstrations.
The content is professionally produced.
The explanations are clear.
The demonstrations are compelling.
The people creating it are extremely knowledgeable.
This ecosystem is self-propagating, commercially successful, and growing rapidly.
And that, in itself, is not a criticism — it is simply an observation.
On the other hand, we have what I’ll broadly call the Excel replacement industry.
ERP vendors.
FP&A platforms.
Planning tools.
Cloud-based enterprise systems.
An industry worth tens of billions of dollars, built largely on one central narrative:
Excel is dangerous, fragile, and unsuitable for serious business.
And here is the shock.
Both sides agree.
They agree that Excel Hell exists.
They agree that spreadsheets are risky at scale.
They agree that enterprise-wide, collaborative, end-to-end processes cannot be trusted to Excel.
And they are right — about the symptoms.
But they are wrong — about the cause.
A Real Corporate Case That Raises an Uncomfortable Question
Let me ground this in a real case.
A large UK FTSE-250 company — a household name — launched a risk-reduction initiative.
Part of that initiative focused on spreadsheets.
Every administrative department was asked a simple but confronting question:
“Which spreadsheets you rely on are not fit for purpose?”
These were spreadsheets the teams themselves had built.
Spreadsheets they depended on daily.
Spreadsheets embedded in critical processes.
And yet, over 1,000 spreadsheets were voluntarily reported as ineffective, fragile, or unfit.
That alone should give us pause.
People were being asked to critique their own work — and they did.
Why?
Because the frustration was real.
Because the inefficiency was painful.
Because the spreadsheets were holding them back.
And this leads to the central question of this entire talk:
How is that even possible?
How can so many spreadsheets fail inside one organisation…
…when there is:
- An ocean of free Excel education
- World-class video instruction
- Paid professional training
- Influencers demonstrating ever more powerful techniques
How do these two realities coexist?
The Missing Distinction No One Is Talking About
The answer is hiding in plain sight.
Almost all Excel education — whether free or paid — lives inside one conceptual space.
That space is the single-user spreadsheet.
One person.
One workbook.
One machine.
One isolated task.
Even when the techniques are advanced — Power Query, dynamic arrays, complex formulas — the architecture never changes.
It is still personal.
Still local.
Still isolated.
And that is the problem.
Enterprise work is not personal.
Enterprise work is:
- Collaborative
- Concurrent
- Multi-departmental
- End-to-end
- Governed
- Audited
- Iterative
Single-user spreadsheet techniques do not scale to:
- Collaboration
- Consolidation
- Governance
- Live processes
Yet this is exactly how spreadsheets are being taught — and therefore built — inside organisations.
Excel Hell Is Real — but It Is Optional
Let’s be clear.
Excel Hell exists.
It looks like this:
- Spreadsheets emailed back and forth
- Copies multiplying daily
- Broken links
- Conflicting numbers
- Manual reconciliation
- Endless versions of “the truth”
Everyone recognises this.
The Excel replacement industry points to it and says:
“This is why Excel doesn’t scale.”
And interestingly — so does the Excel community itself.
The conclusion is almost always the same:
“You need a proper system.”
But here’s the irony.
When ERP and FP&A vendors demonstrate their solutions, what are they really demonstrating?
They are demonstrating client-server architecture.
The Reveal: Excel Already Has the Same Architecture
Every so-called “Excel replacement” succeeds for the same fundamental reason:
- One central source of data
- Many interfaces
- No emailing spreadsheets
- No version chaos
- Live collaboration
- Automated processes
This architecture has a name:
Client–Server
—or—
Hub-and-Spoke
And here is the part almost no one knows:
Excel has supported this architecture for decades.
Not as a bolt-on.
Not as a workaround.
Not as a hack.
It is core Excel.
Excel was designed to:
- Query central data
- Write back to central data
- Act as a client, not a data store
When data is separated from spreadsheets:
- Governance becomes natural
- Audit trails appear automatically
- Collaboration becomes real-time
- Consolidation is instant
- Automation becomes unattended
Excel Hell disappears — not because Excel is replaced, but because it is used correctly.
Why Everyone Still Gets This Wrong
Here is the uncomfortable truth.
The Excel replacement industry cannot acknowledge this — it undermines their commercial narrative.
The Excel education ecosystem does not teach this — it requires architectural thinking, not feature demonstrations.
So both sides converge on the same false belief:
“Excel is inherently unsuitable for enterprise-level processes.”
That belief is now so widespread it feels like common sense.
And yet — it is demonstrably false.
What This Means for Organisations — and for Individuals
When a business realises that:
- Excel can deliver what multi-million-pound systems promise
- Without disruption
- Without vendor lock-in
- Without ripping out existing processes
Something remarkable happens.
What was framed as an IT problem becomes a business capability.
And the people who understand this — who can design Excel systems properly — become extraordinarily valuable.
That is not theory.
That is lived experience.
Closing Thought
Excel Hell is real.
But it is not inevitable.
It is the result of:
- The wrong mindset
- The wrong architecture
- The wrong education
Both sides of the industry agree on the problem.
Both sides miss the solution.
And the solution has been sitting inside Excel all along.
Add comment