In my last blog, I touched upon the similarities between ChatGPT and the early days of spreadsheets, particularly how both have a remarkable quality: speed. Anyone who has used ChatGPT knows that the moment you hit enter—whether it’s a short prompt or a 30-minute brainstorming monologue—it begins responding instantly. This speed reminds me of Google in its early days when it proudly displayed how many milliseconds it took to generate search results. Similarly, when VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software, appeared, its most astonishing feature was how immediately it updated your results after entering a formula.
Before spreadsheets, we had to grab a calculator, key in the numbers, and manually hit the equal sign—an unnecessary journey of fingers to arrive at a solution. Spreadsheets, however, made it instantaneous, and we’ve come to expect that level of immediacy.
Now, I want to draw your attention to something curious. Despite living in a world where instant responses are the norm—from Google searches to getting the weather on our phones—we seem to tolerate overly complex solutions when using Excel. It’s as if we’ve accepted that Excel tasks must involve hundreds of clicks and convoluted formulas, even when the problem itself is simple. Why is that?
Let’s take a step back and consider how drastically technology has changed our expectations. Imagine the time before the internet, when you needed to ask an authority something. You’d write a letter, send it through the mail, wait for it to be read and responded to, and then receive an answer days or weeks later. Today, if you want to know the weather, you open an app, and the information is already there, instantly.
The question you ask is the same in both scenarios, and the answer is the same. But the process is drastically different. We expect instant results now, and yet when it comes to Excel, we’ve become oddly accepting of drawn-out, overly complex steps to reach simple outcomes. How does this make sense in a world where driverless cars and contactless payments are becoming the norm?
Look at any video showcasing Excel’s latest features—whether it’s Power Query, dynamic arrays, or another popular function—and you’ll find solutions to simple challenges that are unnecessarily complicated. Can anyone explain why we tolerate this?
I recently watched a video on how to reconcile two lists in Excel using Power Query. The solution involved 45 clicks. Forty-five! All to get a result that could have been achieved in seconds without that detour. So why do thousands of people watch these videos, praising them in the comments, even though the solutions are so convoluted?
My point is simple: Excel is incredibly powerful, capable of delivering the same instant, contactless results we expect in our daily lives. But for some reason, the popular trend on social media is to make things look more difficult than they need to be. Why?
Is it because we don’t trust things that come too easily? I don’t think so. We trust the weather app, don’t we? We believe the information it provides instantly. So why do we trust unnecessarily complex solutions in Excel?
To answer this, we need to look at the fundamental difference between old-fashioned, letter-writing communication and modern digital systems. Back then, we relied on physical letters to carry our message and receive a response. That process, which involved moving physical objects through a postal system, was where the delay came from. Today, no physical objects move. It’s all data.
What’s this got to do with Excel? Everything. Excel has built-in capabilities that eliminate the need to send spreadsheets back and forth, much like the difference between writing letters and using a weather app. Microsoft engineers built features into Excel decades ago that allow spreadsheets to communicate directly with databases and other spreadsheets, purely through the flow of data. And yet, social media is still showing us solutions that involve 100 clicks, dragging us through complex processes when a much simpler, faster solution exists.
The truth is, many people simply don’t know about these built-in capabilities, and social media content often perpetuates the idea that complicated equals better. But it’s unnecessary. Just as ChatGPT can begin responding instantly when you hit “go,” Excel can give you immediate results without convoluted steps.
So, why is the popular trend toward making things unnecessarily complex? Maybe it’s time to start asking different questions.
This is a podcast by Hiran de Silva. Narrated by Charlie.
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