I’ve recently been reflecting on the Excel training landscape, triggered by a couple of episodes from the WSP Annual Budgeting series. It struck me that one of the major gaps in the Excel ecosystem is the lack of clarity about what skills are needed for different kinds of Excel challenges, job roles, or business scenarios. Nowhere in the current Excel training industry does it adequately address this.
The Problem with Current Excel Training
The Excel training industry is entirely focused on demonstrating what you can do with Excel—formulas, buttons, dynamic arrays, XLOOKUPs, and Power Query. The learners in this environment are expected to acquire these technical skills and assume they’ll be using them in enterprise settings. But here’s the catch: in real-life enterprise environments, many of these flashy skills are irrelevant.
Often, Excel processes are already established by professionals, and what’s needed is someone to execute them—not reinvent them. However, the training landscape has learners believing that they’ll be creating complex formulas and solving sophisticated problems. That’s not always the case, and the discrepancy between what’s taught and what’s needed leads to frustration and inefficiency.
The Mission Impossible Series
This is precisely what I aim to expose in my “Mission Impossible” series. The reality of working with Excel in enterprise settings will come as a shock to those whose only exposure has been through YouTube tutorials and social media-driven training. Many will either create fragmented, chaotic processes—spreadsheets emailed back and forth with little control—or they will struggle to grasp the broader context of their work.
Most Excel learners are focused on their own small slice of the workflow, oblivious to the bigger picture. If they took the time to consider how their boss or their boss’s boss sees the process, they would gain a valuable perspective. Unfortunately, most Excel training doesn’t encourage this type of thinking, reinforcing a siloed approach to problem-solving.
A Bias Toward Bad Practices
Corporate Excel training reinforces these bad habits. People are trained to work within their narrow scope, leading to poorly designed, non-scalable spreadsheets that can’t adapt to future needs. These spreadsheets lack the bigger picture view, and while this doesn’t seem like a big deal on the surface, it perpetuates inefficiency. The industry simply accepts these shortcomings as the price of working with spreadsheets, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
The Opportunity for Change
There’s an enormous opportunity here for business leaders and Excel experts alike. Take my own consulting cases as an example. In every single one, I encountered decision-makers who believed that the chaotic state of their Excel processes was just the way things had to be. They were conditioned to accept the limitations of spreadsheets, or they were told by experts that there was no better option.
But this belief is false. A classic case from earlier this year involved a common business scenario: scaling a call handler operation. The social media Excel influencers unanimously said Excel wasn’t suitable for this kind of scaling. Ironically, these are the same people who promote advanced Excel skills and automation techniques, yet they quickly dismiss Excel’s capabilities for larger-scale tasks.
What they missed, however, is that Excel has had built-in features for decades that make this problem easily solvable. None of the Excel experts who initially dismissed the solution revisited the topic when it was demonstrated that Excel could indeed handle the challenge. The disconnect between what Excel can do and what’s being taught is glaring.
Bridging the Gap
The Excel training regime is driven by the demands of social media algorithms rather than the needs of real businesses. The influencers focus on showing off what Excel’s buttons and formulas can do, but there’s no emphasis on solving actual business problems. When they demonstrate Excel’s features, they use overly simple examples, far removed from real-world complexity.
The problem is not just with the learners. The instructors themselves often have no experience in applying these tools in complex, enterprise environments. Their content is focused on product demonstration, not problem-solving.
The Real Skills Gap
This brings us to the real Excel skills gap. On the one side, we have endless product demonstrations, and on the other, we have the complex problems that need solving in the enterprise. In between is a void—no guidance on how to bridge the gap between knowing how to use Excel’s features and solving real-world problems.
This gap remains unaddressed because social media training doesn’t offer the practical, enterprise-level knowledge needed to navigate these challenges. The influencers and content creators are not working at a management level where these skills are crucial.
Conclusion
The skills gap in Excel training is not widely recognized, but it is incredibly important. If we fail to acknowledge the need for strategic decision-making in Excel-based enterprise processes, we fall into the trap of human error—specifically, the error of using the wrong approach at the highest levels of management.
In one of my consulting projects, a company was entirely dependent on manually sharing and shuffling spreadsheets, which created a chaotic and unmanageable workflow. By shifting to a data flow architecture, we solved the problem and created a scalable solution for future growth. The same transformation is possible in many businesses today if they focus on the bigger picture and adopt the right practices.
There’s a huge opportunity for business leaders and Excel professionals who understand this gap—and who are willing to step beyond the constraints of popular Excel training. By adopting better data flow practices and scalable solutions, the inefficiencies that are accepted as a necessary evil can be eliminated, and businesses can thrive.
In summary, the gap between what is taught in Excel training and what is needed in enterprise environments is large, but solvable. It just requires looking beyond what social media content offers and focusing on solving real business problems at scale.
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