By Hiran de Silva
Mark Proctor makes a sharp and important observation on LinkedIn:
Excel’s capabilities have accelerated dramatically over the last decade, while employer-funded Excel training has largely flatlined. The visual he shared — features racing ahead while training plateaus — lands because it feels true. It looks like a classic “lost opportunity”.
The Ferrari analogy fits perfectly. What’s the point of a Ferrari if most drivers never get out of first gear?
But here’s the uncomfortable twist.
The problem is not that people aren’t being trained enough on Excel.
The problem is that they are being trained brilliantly — for the wrong context.
The Lloyds Banking Group wake-up call
Let me rewind to a real-world case.
I was involved in a major spreadsheet risk review at Lloyds Banking Group during a period of intense media scrutiny of UK retail banking technology. Spreadsheets were seen as a major operational risk, so the bank asked departments to self-report spreadsheets that were “not fit for purpose”.
What happened next shocked everyone.
Within weeks, over 1,000 spreadsheets were reported — by the very people who built them.
These weren’t amateur creations. They were:
- slow
- crashing
- riddled with version-control problems
- emailed back and forth
- overloaded with data
- impossible to collaborate on
- brittle under consolidation
And the question on everyone’s lips was simple:
How is this possible — when there is so much Excel training out there?
The paradox: unlimited training, unusable spreadsheets
At first glance, it makes no sense.
Excel training is everywhere:
- YouTube
- webinars
- social media
- free tutorials
- beautifully produced demos by articulate, credible experts
So how could the spreadsheets people actually rely on be so fragile?
The answer becomes obvious once you step back.
Almost all Excel training is designed for:
- a single user
- on a single machine
- working on a single spreadsheet
- doing an isolated, ad-hoc task
That training is often excellent.
It’s just not enterprise training.
Excel is being taught as a document — not as part of a system
Enterprise processes don’t run on documents.
They run on data flows, responsibility, governance, and connected systems.
Yet Excel is almost universally taught as if it were:
- a personal canvas
- a clever document
- a place where data lives inside cells
That mindset is fatal at scale.
The 1,000+ Lloyds spreadsheets weren’t “badly trained”.
They were perfectly trained — for a hobbyist context.
The Wall Street Journal moment everyone misunderstood
This confusion surfaced publicly in a 2017 The Wall Street Journal advertorial that caused uproar in the Excel community. The headline suggested finance leaders were banning Excel.
Excel professionals pushed back hard — arguing (correctly) that Excel is far more powerful than critics claim.
But something extraordinary happened.
Nobody identified the real problem.
One example in that article came from Jim Bell, who explained why his company moved budgeting from Excel to Anaplan: collaboration.
With ~400 restaurants, Excel budgeting had become a nightmare. Anaplan’s client-server architecture solved it.
Here’s the kicker:
Excel already had that architecture.
Not one expert response mentioned it.
Even Brian Jones, then at Microsoft, responded by pointing to co-authoring — which is document collaboration, not data collaboration. He was answering a different question entirely.
Power Query: the perfect social-media tool — and the wrong enterprise tool
This same misunderstanding plays out today with Power Query.
There are:
- ~10,000 videos on Power Query consolidation
- ~50,000 articles and tutorials
Consolidation is the killer demo. It looks dramatic. It eliminates external links. It’s visually satisfying.
But in real enterprise budgeting, it introduces two deal-breakers:
1. It turns a live process into a batch process
Budgeting is a weeks-long, negotiated, real-time management activity.
Power Query centralises consolidation with one operator pressing Refresh.
Management hate that — rightly.
2. It destroys the report format
Managers don’t want PivotTables.
They want their budget report, in their familiar layout, live and editable.
For this reason alone, Power Query-based budgeting is routinely rejected — quietly — in the real world.
Yet social media never shows this failure.
The missing truth no one teaches
Here’s the part nobody seems willing to say out loud:
- Excel already supports enterprise-grade, client-server, collaborative processes
- Excel already integrates natively with relational databases
- Microsoft Office already ships with the database
- Cloud SQL is already included in many corporate licences
This takes seconds to demonstrate.
But it isn’t sexy.
It isn’t influencer-friendly.
It doesn’t generate likes.
So it’s invisible.
Why employers don’t fund Excel training
Now we can answer Mark Proctor’s question properly.
Employers aren’t under-investing in Excel training because they don’t value Excel.
They’re under-investing because the training available doesn’t solve enterprise problems.
From management’s perspective:
- staff learn complex techniques
- build fragile artefacts
- then leave
- and the organisation is worse off than before
Why would a CFO fund more of that?
The real gap isn’t skills — it’s context
Excel doesn’t need more training.
It needs different training.
Training that treats Excel as:
- a client in a system
- a participant in an end-to-end process
- a front-end to governed data
- a platform for scale, reach, collaboration, consolidation, and connected processes
Until that shift happens, the Ferrari will keep getting faster —
and everyone will still be stuck in first gear.
That’s the real reason the gap exists.
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