Popularizing Professional Excel: Brainstorming Key Points

1. Enterprise Context In professional Excel, we are primarily dealing with an enterprise context. This requires a different mindset compared to single-user scenarios. Enterprise work often involves client-server architecture, leveraging Excel to set up processes on a hub-and-spoke model. This is not commonly discussed in “popular Excel” found on social media.
2. Management Preferences In an enterprise setting, we must focus on management preferences rather than individual preferences. It’s essential to understand what your bosses want. This includes systemization, process automation, scalability, and minimal manual work. Managers are often under the impression that these goals require expensive systems and external vendors, but we can achieve them with Excel when using the right approach.
3. Delivering Visible Transformation By delivering visible transformation through Excel, your bosses and their superiors will recognize your value. This is how influence and kudos are earned, leading to funding and career advancement. Showing how Excel can deliver enterprise-level results with minimal investment can open doors for promotions and a larger role within the organization.
4. Skunk Works for Innovation A ‘Skunk Works’ approach is often the best way to introduce innovation. Management may not always be the best at researching new opportunities, but giving you the freedom to explore and innovate using Excel can unlock enormous potential.
5. Hidden Excel Features We need to explore features of Excel that aren’t widely promoted on social media. For example, data access through ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) is a powerful tool rarely mentioned, but it can provide incredible results in an enterprise environment. Progressing from this to more advanced technologies like Google Action Scripts or Office Scripts is possible but not always necessary. Understanding how to leverage Excel with relational databases is a core skill that transforms workflows.
6. Get and Put Functions Learning the basics of GET and PUT operations, which allow bi-directional data flow, is crucial. These simple skills can transform how data is managed across spreadsheets, and when combined with a strategic approach, can lead to impactful results.
7. Results Over Certificates In professional Excel, you’re judged on results, not certificates. Following an online course and earning a certificate is irrelevant here. What matters is delivering real-world solutions that impress management. Mentoring, proof-of-concept projects, and prototyping are key to honing these skills.
8. Collaborative Learning Excel surgeries (consulting sessions) are an excellent way to learn. You don’t have to bring a problem yourself—just listening to the cases of others provides valuable insight. Contrast this with popular Excel courses, where participants often lose interest early, and the certificate means nothing without real application.
9. Thinking Beyond Set Pieces Popular Excel focuses on showing set pieces—predefined solutions to specific problems. But in professional Excel, we need to recognize the bigger picture. It’s not about memorizing formulas; it’s about understanding the real-life scenarios and applying solutions you’ve seen before, either in a demo or a project. I call these “The Dirty Dozen,” 12 common scenarios and their solutions, which serve as frameworks to solve more complex problems.
10. Framework and Customization Having a set framework of Excel solutions is helpful, but only if you understand the conceptual side of things. The technical know-how needed is minimal, but once you grasp the fundamentals, such as working with relational databases, you’ll have a global reach that scales easily.
11. Scaling Simplicity Many popular Excel challenges overcomplicate simple problems. In contrast, professional Excel expands the requirements and shows how simple they are to solve once you understand the first principles. This allows for massive scalability without unnecessary complexity.
12. Challenging the Popular Approach Popular Excel tends to present overly complex solutions, making the work seem harder than it is. Often, this leads to 10-minute videos explaining something that could be done much more simply. By understanding the fundamentals, you can provide scalable solutions that are easy to implement.
13. Adding Real Value My mission is to make professional Excel attractive by showing how it adds real value in enterprise settings. While many focus on the features of Excel, we focus on how Excel can create value in the enterprise. For example, many Excel influencers suggest consolidation techniques using external links or Power Query, or even recommend costly alternatives like SAP or Anaplan. But by leveraging relational databases with Excel, we can simplify and streamline the process at a fraction of the cost.
14. Excel’s Real Capabilities One of the common criticisms from the alternative-to-Excel industry is that Excel can’t handle consolidation well. This is false. Using a relational database, even Access, turns consolidation into a piece of cake. This is something that’s demonstrated in my professional work and is central to my mission of popularizing professional Excel.
15. The Mission Impossible Series To popularize professional Excel, we need to make it more attractive and accessible. My “Mission Impossible” series is part of this effort—showing how these concepts work in high-stakes scenarios and making professional Excel solutions irresistible.

This is a comprehensive brainstorming list. There may be additional points to explore, but these are the core ideas for popularizing professional Excel. The goal of Popularising Professional Excel is to make these concepts attractive, demonstrate their value, and show that professional Excel solutions can lead to significant financial gains.