Why I’ve Changed My Mind About Thirty Years of Arguing with the Excel Replacement Industry
By Hiran de Silva
For almost thirty years I have been fighting what I saw as one particular problem.
The demonisation of Excel.
Whenever a budgeting vendor, planning vendor or “Excel replacement” company published another white paper explaining why spreadsheets were dangerous, I instinctively pushed back.
I saw it as misleading.
I saw it as unfair.
I saw it as an attack on a tool I knew could achieve far more than its critics claimed.
Looking back, I now realise I was focusing on only one small part of a much bigger picture.
The real story isn’t about Excel at all.
It’s about something much more fundamental.
It’s about the difference between truth and the selective use of truth.
That distinction matters.
Because a true statement can still be used dishonestly.
A Truth Can Be Used Honestly…
…or Dishonestly.
Think about the Earth.
The Earth is round.
That is observable.
Testable.
Evidence-based.
No amount of opinion changes that.
But any truth—even one as well established as that—can still be used dishonestly.
Facts don’t prevent manipulation.
People manipulate facts by choosing which ones to present…
…and which ones to hide.
That, I now believe, is exactly what has happened in the enterprise spreadsheet industry.
Chaos and Order
The IT industry has spent the last thirty-five years demonstrating something that is unquestionably true.
Disconnected documents create chaos.
Shared data creates order.
Nobody seriously disputes this.
If information is copied into dozens of different files…
emailed backwards and forwards…
edited independently…
and manually reconciled…
then complexity grows naturally.
Eventually nobody knows which copy is correct.
On the other hand…
if everyone works against one centrally managed version of the truth…
the chaos disappears.
That is not marketing.
That is reality.
It applies to finance.
It applies to healthcare.
It applies to engineering.
It applies to almost every collaborative business process.
The principle is universal.
Jackson Pollock versus Mondrian
I’ve often illustrated this using two paintings.
One resembles a Jackson Pollock.
Lines everywhere.
Everything connected to everything else.
Information flowing in every direction.
The other resembles a Piet Mondrian.
Simple.
Structured.
Organised.
Calm.
The comparison isn’t really about art.
It’s about architecture.
One represents point-to-point communication.
The other represents centrally organised communication.
Given the choice, almost everyone would prefer the second.
We naturally seek order.
Entropy and Human Behaviour
In physics, entropy is commonly used as a measure of disorder within a system.
Left alone, many physical systems naturally become more disordered over time unless energy is applied to organise them.
Businesses experience something remarkably similar.
Without deliberate design…
new spreadsheets appear…
new copies are emailed…
new reconciliations are invented…
new exceptions emerge…
until eventually nobody understands how everything fits together.
The swamp grows.
Most organisations instinctively want to move in the opposite direction.
Towards clarity.
Towards simplicity.
Towards order.
That desire is entirely legitimate.
The Philosophical Truth
This is the point I missed for many years.
The enterprise software industry is demonstrating a genuine truth.
Moving from disconnected documents towards centrally managed data is a good thing.
It represents movement from chaos towards order.
That message deserves to be taught.
It deserves to be understood.
In fact, I believe every finance professional should understand it.
So where does the problem begin?
When Truth Becomes Salesmanship
The problem isn’t the message.
The problem is what gets left out.
Imagine someone demonstrating two diagrams.
On one side…
dozens of spreadsheets being emailed around an organisation.
On the other…
a modern client-server system with one shared database.
That comparison is perfectly valid.
Until someone quietly changes the caption underneath.
Instead of saying…
Point-to-point documents versus client-server architecture
they say…
Excel versus our product.
That changes everything.
Because it quietly hides an extremely important fact.
Excel has supported client-server architecture for decades.
The Missing Piece
Microsoft solved this problem in the 1990s.
Office 97 introduced ActiveX Data Objects (ADO).
Excel, Word, Access and PowerPoint could all communicate directly with shared databases.
The spreadsheet no longer needed to become the database.
The spreadsheet became the client.
The database became the shared source of truth.
Later, the database simply moved into the cloud.
The architecture remained exactly the same.
This wasn’t hidden technology.
Microsoft demonstrated it publicly.
Bill Gates promoted the concept through his vision of the “Digital Nervous System.”
Satya Nadella himself demonstrated the underlying connectivity during Microsoft’s DevCast presentations long before becoming CEO.
The capability has existed for decades.
The Pension Story
Years before I became known for enterprise Excel work, I worked on visual pension illustrations.
The pension industry had a problem.
Customers saw enormous projected pension values forty years into the future.
Millions of pounds.
Salespeople naturally highlighted those enormous figures.
The problem was that customers interpreted them using today’s purchasing power.
Most of that apparent wealth simply represented inflation.
The regulations explained this.
The mathematics explained this.
But the explanation was often brushed aside.
The larger number sold more pensions.
When I developed visual models showing pension values in today’s money, something fascinating happened.
Some advisers loved it.
Professionals and high-net-worth clients appreciated understanding the truth.
Other salespeople hated it.
Their response was brutally honest.
“If customers understand this…
they won’t buy.”
The mathematics hadn’t changed.
Only the presentation had changed.
Exactly the same truth.
Completely different commercial outcome.
Exactly the Same Pattern
I now believe the same thing happens in the enterprise software market.
The movement from chaos to order is real.
It is valuable.
It should be encouraged.
But some vendors quietly depend upon customers believing that the only route from chaos to order is to purchase their software.
That is where philosophy becomes marketing.
And where marketing can become misleading.
Trading Standards
This is exactly why I created my fictional investigators…
Fair Trading…
and Goldie Standards.
Their purpose isn’t to attack products.
Their purpose is much simpler.
Fact-check the claims.
Not by expressing opinions.
But by presenting evidence.
If someone claims Excel cannot perform bottom-up consolidation…
show the evidence.
If someone defines a database in a way that excludes modern enterprise databases…
show the evidence.
If someone presents a comparison between chaos and order…
show the architecture behind both examples.
The investigation matters far more than the conclusion.
The Bigger Picture
This is the important shift in my own thinking.
For thirty years I believed I was arguing against the demonisation of Excel.
Today I realise something different.
The industry is teaching a genuinely valuable lesson.
Order is better than chaos.
Shared data is better than disconnected documents.
Client-server architecture is better than point-to-point communication.
Those are important truths.
What deserves scrutiny is not the philosophy.
It is whether that philosophy is being presented honestly.
If businesses are encouraged to believe that they must replace Excel in order to achieve those benefits…
while never being told that Excel itself has supported exactly the same architecture for decades…
then they are making purchasing decisions without all the relevant information.
That is precisely the kind of claim worthy of investigation.
Not because it criticises Excel.
But because it withholds the complete picture.
And that is why Fair Trading and Goldie Standards have work to do.
Not to defend Excel.
Not to attack software vendors.
But simply to shine a brighter light on the evidence.
Because once people can see the whole picture…
they are perfectly capable of making up their own minds.
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