By Hiran de Silva
There is a complaint I occasionally hear from people who create Excel content on social media.
They spend an enormous amount of time researching a subject, building a demonstration, recording it, editing the video and explaining a technique clearly. Then somebody comes along and says:
There is a better way.
I understand why that can be frustrating.
Mark Proctor has made this point. Creating high-quality educational content takes considerable effort. Mynda Treacy, Leila Gharani, Mark and many others have built substantial bodies of material helping people become better Excel users.
That work has value.
But I think there is an important misunderstanding here.
Because, although it may sometimes appear that people like me are competing with Excel influencers, for most of my career we have actually been serving different audiences.
And those audiences have very different problems.
Two audiences
Think again about the pyramid I have described in several of my recent articles.
At the broad bottom of the pyramid are millions of people using Excel personally.
They have a workbook.
They need to analyse some data.
They want to create a PivotTable, write a formula, learn Power Query, use dynamic arrays, understand LAMBDA, automate something or make their spreadsheet easier to maintain.
That is an enormous audience.
And naturally, it is the audience around which the Excel education industry has developed.
Social media is particularly well suited to it.
You can demonstrate a useful technique on a screen.
You can say:
“Here is the problem. Here is the technique. Watch what happens when I click Refresh.”
That can make an excellent YouTube video.
But there is another audience.
It is much smaller.
And it is the audience I have spent much of the last 30 years serving.
These are the people responsible for the end-to-end business process.
They aren’t primarily interested in whether something uses Power Query, VBA, Python, LAMBDA, Office Scripts or anything else.
They want to know:
Will the process work?
Can 400 people use it?
Can we consolidate their data?
Can everybody see the correct information?
Can we control who can change what?
Can we audit it?
Can we reconcile it?
Can we change the organisation structure next month?
Can we get the answer before the board meeting?
And, perhaps most importantly:
What can go wrong?
That is a very different audience.
The boardroom asks “Why?”
I learned very early that senior business people don’t particularly care what technology is fashionable.
They care about outcomes.
And experienced senior managers have another characteristic.
They have seen things go wrong before.
They have seen consultants arrive with wonderful presentations.
They have bought systems.
They have funded projects.
They have been told:
“This is the modern way of doing it.”
And sometimes they have had their fingers badly burnt.
So when you walk into that environment and recommend something, the conversation can become uncomfortable very quickly.
Why?
Why this?
Why not that?
Why will this work?
Why didn’t the previous solution work?
What happens when we double the number of users?
What happens when the organisation changes?
What happens when somebody enters the wrong data?
What happens when we need to reconcile it?
What happens at year end?
I encountered exactly this kind of questioning from Tom Bauer at WSP.
Tom was brilliant at it.
You couldn’t simply tell Tom:
“We should use this technology.”
He would ask:
Why?
And you had better have an answer.
Trending is not a business case
Suppose somebody recommends Power Query.
A perfectly reasonable question from the boardroom might be:
Why Power Query?
“Because everybody is talking about it” isn’t an answer.
“It’s Microsoft’s latest technology” isn’t an answer.
“It’s trending on YouTube” certainly isn’t an answer.
The answer has to come from understanding the process.
For example, Power Query is extraordinarily useful for bringing data together.
But imagine that the real business problem is not primarily getting data into one spreadsheet.
Imagine that the problem is that data currently scattered across hundreds of spreadsheets needs to be held once, centrally, where all those spreadsheets can reach it.
That changes the architectural question completely.
Instead of asking:
How do I consolidate these spreadsheets?
we might ask:
Why are hundreds of spreadsheets independently storing the data in the first place?
Put the data in one structured central location.
Let the spreadsheets GET what they need.
Let authorised users PUT changes back.
Suddenly we have a hub-and-spoke process instead of hundreds of point-to-point relationships.
That is the Digital Librarian.
And Excel already has the plumbing to do it.
That is the kind of conversation I have spent decades having with businesses.
Different research for different audiences
So when an Excel influencer says:
“Do you realise how much work went into creating that demonstration?”
my answer is:
Yes. Absolutely.
But there is another kind of research and development.
I have spent roughly 30 years doing it.
Not primarily to make videos.
Not primarily to demonstrate Excel features.
I did it because, when I walked into a business and somebody responsible for a multimillion-pound process asked why, I needed an answer.
I needed to understand the alternatives.
I needed to understand why the previous process failed.
I needed to understand what would happen at scale.
And preferably, I needed to demonstrate that the alternative actually worked.
That is a different form of intellectual capital.
Today I am trying to capture some of that intellectual capital, package it, demonstrate it and make it available to other people.
So are we competitors?
In theory?
Not really.
The Excel influencer and the enterprise process designer are largely serving different audiences.
Leila Gharani herself recognised this distinction when I discussed it with her at the Global Excel Summit.
There is nothing wrong with serving the huge Excel learning audience.
Indeed, there is an obvious reason why influencers do it.
That is where the audience is.
People want to learn Power Query.
They want to learn dynamic arrays.
They want Copilot.
They want Python.
They want the latest Microsoft feature.
So naturally content creators respond.
But there is a paradox.
Because in practice there is some competition.
And that competition isn’t really between people.
It is between two ways of thinking about spreadsheets.
The missing part of Excel education
Much of Excel education teaches people how to make a spreadsheet work extremely well locally.
But businesses don’t operate locally.
Businesses are collaborative by nature.
Budgeting is collaborative.
Forecasting is collaborative.
Procurement is collaborative.
Supply chains are collaborative.
Regulatory reporting is collaborative.
Management reporting is collaborative.
Data collection is collaborative.
These processes involve multiple people, departments, locations, systems and levels of management.
Yet much Excel education begins with one person sitting in front of one workbook.
That is the mismatch.
And I want to stress something.
That is not the fault of Excel influencers.
They didn’t create the problem.
They are serving the audience that exists.
The problem occurs when techniques designed and demonstrated for the local spreadsheet are carried unchanged into the enterprise environment.
That is when the trouble starts.
Learning to drive in a car park
There is an analogy that makes this much easier to understand.
Near me is Bluewater shopping centre.
Driving schools have used areas of its car parks to allow youngsters who are not yet old enough to drive on public roads to learn basic driving skills.
That is perfectly sensible.
You can learn steering.
Braking.
Clutch control.
Changing gear.
Parking.
All useful skills.
Now imagine something rather strange.
Imagine that all driving education stopped there.
Everyone learned to drive beautifully around the car park.
And then, one day, we put them onto the public highway.
Suddenly there are buses.
Pedestrians.
Junctions.
Traffic lights.
Motorways.
Speed limits.
Road signs.
Other drivers.
Rules.
Risk.
The skills learned in the car park haven’t suddenly become wrong.
They are still perfectly valid.
They are simply insufficient for the environment in which the driver is now operating.
That, to me, is a good description of the problem with much Excel education.
Excel’s public highway
A standalone spreadsheet is the car park.
You can make it magnificent.
Use Power Query.
Use dynamic arrays.
Use LAMBDA.
Use Python.
Use PivotTables.
Use whatever technology is appropriate.
But now take that spreadsheet onto the public highway of business.
Give it 100 users.
Or 400.
Spread them across departments.
Cities.
Countries.
Give them different permissions.
Require audit trails.
Require consolidation.
Require reconciliation.
Require central control.
Allow the organisation structure to change.
Require data to flow both ways.
And require the entire process to work tomorrow morning.
Now we are dealing with something very different.
The question isn’t:
How clever is the spreadsheet?
The question is:
How is the process architected?
Mission Impossible
That is why I created my Mission Impossible challenges.
They are not designed to prove that Power Query is bad.
They are not designed to prove that LAMBDA is bad.
They are not designed to embarrass Excel educators.
They do something much simpler.
They take familiar Excel techniques and familiar Excel teaching scenarios and say:
Fine. Now scale it.
Take the same idea onto the public highway.
Give it more people.
Give it scale.
Give it reach.
Give it collaboration.
Give it auditability.
Give it management control.
Now show us how it works.
My Elen Footballer Challenge does precisely this.
So does the Gordon Ramsay Experiment.
The point isn’t that the original technique was wrong.
The point is to reveal what happens when the problem changes.
And once people experience that difference, something interesting happens.
They start asking different questions.
The apparent competition
So perhaps this isn’t really a competition between Hiran and the Excel influencers at all.
It is a competition between two mental models.
One begins with:
How can I make this workbook better?
The other begins with:
How should this business process work?
Both may eventually use Excel.
But they start from very different places.
The first naturally leads us towards features, formulas and techniques.
The second leads us towards architecture, data, collaboration, controls, workflow and management requirements.
And this is the territory I want to explore.
Because the enterprise doesn’t need fewer good Excel users.
It needs more of them.
But it also needs Excel professionals who understand what happens when the spreadsheet leaves the car park and joins the public highway.
That is the gap.
That is the audience I have spent 30 years serving.
And that is why what may initially look like competition with Excel’s social media influencers is actually something rather different.
They are teaching people how to drive the car.
I am interested in what happens when we take it onto the road.
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