In today’s hyper-connected world, social media platforms have an outsized influence on education and skill development, including Excel training. YouTube channels, TikTok tutorials, and Instagram reels dominate how individuals, including spreadsheet beginners, learn Excel. While this might seem like a good thing on the surface, a dangerous divide exists between popular social media-driven Excel training and the real-world needs of enterprise-level processes. This divide encourages bad practices that are not just inefficient but downright detrimental in larger business contexts.
The “Popular Mindset” vs. The “Enterprise Mindset”
Excel, as a tool, can be approached from two vastly different mindsets. The first, the “popular mindset,” is characterized by a narrow, single-user focus. This mindset sees a spreadsheet as a large sheet of paper, with all attention focused on solving an immediate, local problem. Tutorials teaching this mindset are popular because they provide quick, digestible content that appeals to freelancers, solo entrepreneurs, or hobbyists creating spreadsheets for limited use. These techniques often work well in small, isolated contexts.
However, when these same techniques are applied in an enterprise setting, the results can be catastrophic. In a business where teams need to collaborate, where data must be updated and shared across departments, and where processes require automation, the narrow focus of social media-driven techniques quickly collapses. The result is what I call the “Jackson Pollock scenario”—a chaotic, messy system of spreadsheets that are passed up and down the organizational hierarchy, creating inefficiencies, confusion, and potential errors.
The Appeal of Bad Practice in Social Media
Why does this happen? Social media’s primary currency is engagement—likes, subscribes, shares, and comments. Influencers who produce Excel content are driven by these metrics, often with little regard for whether the techniques they teach are scalable or appropriate for larger contexts. The goal is not to create sustainable, enterprise-level solutions but to provide content that their audience finds quick, easy, and visually appealing.
Complex, long-term solutions like process automation or hub-and-spoke architectures, which are essential for enterprise-level Excel work, don’t fit well into this model. They require deeper understanding, planning, and critical thinking—skills that are not easily distilled into a 30-second TikTok video or a quick YouTube tutorial. Instead, social media content tends to favor manual, isolated tasks under the guise of “efficiency,” when in reality, these techniques often lead to manual errors, version control issues, and an inability to scale.
Even when influencers talk about automation, it often focuses on automating repetitive tasks within the context of a single spreadsheet, perpetuating the manual, narrow approach. While this may give the impression of modernity, it only exacerbates the problem in larger enterprises where spreadsheets are integral to broader workflows.
The Enterprise Reality: A Call for Scalable Solutions
The enterprise mindset, in contrast, must be concerned with scalability, collaboration, and automation. Processes should not rely on manual intervention where avoidable, and spreadsheets should work as part of a larger ecosystem, often integrating with databases, other software, and even cloud services. This requires a completely different approach: designing spreadsheets with a focus on minimizing manual effort, ensuring accuracy through automation, and structuring data to support easy collaboration.
In these environments, the hub-and-spoke model is indispensable—a centralized system where data can be updated automatically across multiple spreadsheets, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and efficiency. This is the approach that enterprises need, yet it’s rarely discussed in social media-driven Excel content. Influencers often overlook or are simply unaware of these techniques because they are designed for single-user environments and quick, flashy content that generates likes.
The Social Media Influencer Disconnect
It’s worth pointing out that many social media influencers in the Excel space have limited, if any, experience in enterprise environments or business leadership. Their focus is on creating content that appeals to their audiences, who are often hobbyists or freelancers, not enterprise spreadsheet managers. Even if these influencers were aware of more scalable techniques, they are less likely to promote them because their audience cannot relate to them. Their viewers, after all, know even less about enterprise processes and are therefore not the target audience for such content.
Instead, influencers serve content that appeals to the immediate needs of their viewers, regardless of whether these techniques would collapse under the weight of enterprise requirements. The problem with this is that even well-meaning viewers who learn from these influencers are led down the wrong path, applying single-user techniques in enterprise settings, only to create chaotic, unscalable, and inefficient systems. This is a trend that has been going on for years, and it shows no signs of stopping.
A Historical Parallel: From Manual Cars to Self-Driving Automation
The trajectory of Excel training on social media is reminiscent of a paradigm shift we’ve seen in technology: the move from manual transmission cars to self-driving automation. Decades ago, driving a car required skill, attention, and manual control over the vehicle. Today, we are moving into a world of contactless, automated driving, where the car does the work for us.
Similarly, spreadsheets of the past were labor-intensive, manual creations. But today’s enterprise-level needs require contactless, process-driven automation. Yet social media continues to teach the “manual transmission” of spreadsheet creation—the old-fashioned methods that are no longer suitable in today’s world of complex data processes.
Conclusion: The Need for Change
The danger of social media influence in Excel training is that it promotes bad practices by catering to what’s popular, not what’s effective. This might work for freelancers or solo entrepreneurs, but it’s disastrous when applied in enterprise contexts where scalability, process automation, and collaboration are crucial. As social media continues to shape how we learn Excel, it’s vital to recognize the divide between these two worlds and actively seek out better, scalable solutions.
In enterprise Excel, the goal should not be to create quick-fix, flashy solutions, but to design processes that can stand the test of time, scaling efficiently as the business grows. Social media influencers, with their focus on engagement, are unlikely to provide these solutions, but by learning to look beyond what’s popular, Excel users can break out of the narrow box and see the bigger picture—one that leads to sustainable success.
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