In the world of Excel, there’s a paradox: we, as enthusiasts, love working with Excel–exploring its endless features, solving complex problems, building intricate formulas. And yet, Excel, when mastered, has the unique ability to eliminate the very work that we so enjoy doing with it. It’s a curious situation: the more skilled we become, the more we automate, streamline, and simplify, rendering much of our manual labor unnecessary. This article is a follow-up to my previous piece, where I argued that up to 80% of Excel tasks in industry are both necessary and, paradoxically, unnecessary. Here, I delve into why this is, examining the strange and sometimes uncomfortable truth about our favorite software.
Excel Enthusiasm: A Desire to Do More.
People who love Excel want to do more with it, much like enthusiasts in any hobby or field. Think about a musician who thrives on playing and improvising, a model aircraft enthusiast building planes, or a tennis player who looks forward to every game. What these passions have in common is the drive to engage more deeply, to play, explore, and expand.
In Excel, this manifests in mastering a vast landscape of functions and features: from basic formulas and conditional formatting to advanced tools like Power Query, dynamic arrays, and lambda functions. As we journey deeper, Microsoft regularly releases new features, providing fresh opportunities to dive into Excel’s capabilities and share our discoveries with others, often through social media or tutorial videos. Excel is designed to give us more Excel to explore.
The Transformation of Excel Work: From Necessary Tasks to Unnecessary Labour.
But what happens when our passion for Excel and our expertise in it meet the demands of creating value in the workplace? Typically, the goal is to take inefficient processes and transform them into efficient, productive workflows. However, in doing so, we inadvertently begin to chip away at the manual, repetitive tasks that make up the bulk of traditional Excel work.
Consider the numerous tasks that fill a typical day for Excel users in an organization:
– Importing data
– Copying, pasting, and formatting
– Reconciling spreadsheets with each other
– Generating and distributing reports
If we list all the typical Excel tasks, we’ll find that around 80% of them fall under manual, repetitive actions–processes that could be streamlined or even automated away entirely. Ironically, by Excel itself!
Imagine the journey of early explorers sailing from California to Florida before the Panama Canal was constructed. With bigger sails and better engines, the journey could be faster and smoother, but it still required sailing around South America. The Panama Canal, however, re-engineered the journey entirely, reducing time and effort to a fraction by simply offering a new route. Likewise, Excel experts, by re-engineering workflows, can eliminate unnecessary work rather than merely speeding it up.
The Impact of Re-Engineering Workflows with Excel.
By rethinking our processes with Excel in a professional, enterprise-oriented way, we unlock efficiency, eliminating the need for much of this manual labor altogether. Excel’s capabilities allow us to build systems where data flows effortlessly, reconciliations happen automatically, and reports are generated on demand, without human intervention. This is where the paradox emerges: the more we automate, the less there is for us to do. For many people in an organization, that 80% of Excel work is rendered unnecessary.
In one of my early consulting experiences, I automated a process that previously occupied an entire team. With the work re-engineered, that team of ten could be replaced by just two people. The result? The organization saw substantial productivity gains, and I was rewarded with a significant pay raise. However, this also created an uncomfortable reality: what happens to those jobs?
But wait. That work that they were doing, the 80% day in and day out with Excel – is now rendered unnecessary by the clever use of Excel itself.
A Question of Incentive.
Here’s the dilemma: for Excel enthusiasts, more Excel work is inherently enjoyable. But for organizations, efficiency often means reducing Excel work to the bare essentials. This raises a difficult question: What incentive do Excel experts have to reduce the work they love?
From a management perspective, the incentive is clear. The streamlined processes we can create with Excel deliver incredible value–eliminating waste, improving accuracy, and freeing up resources for higher-level tasks. Yet for the individuals whose jobs center on traditional Excel tasks, automation may feel like a threat to their roles and responsibilities. The roles that, now, Excel is doing all by itself, without you.
The Irony of Excel Training.
Here’s the curious situation Excel professionals now find themselves in. On the one hand, social media influencers and course creators are constantly promoting new Excel skills–Power Query, dynamic arrays, lambda functions–as essential knowledge. Yet, in an optimized, automated system, many of these manual tasks become obsolete. This begs the question: if we’re automating away the work, what are we training for?
For Excel to serve as a tool for innovation and efficiency in organizations, we may need to rethink our approach. Excel’s value lies in enabling a leaner, smarter workflow, not in perpetuating unnecessary tasks. This doesn’t mean there’s no place for learning; rather, it suggests that we should focus on skills that drive systemic improvements and scalable solutions.
Embracing the Paradox.
As Excel enthusiasts, we must grapple with this paradox: the more we master Excel, the more we automate, and the less we need to use Excel in traditional, manual ways. The challenge is finding satisfaction not in the repetition of tasks, but in the creative process of building, optimizing, and evolving systems that work with minimal intervention.
The answer to the dilemma, then, is not to shy away from efficiency but to embrace Excel’s power as a transformative tool. By doing so, we can create lasting value, contributing to leaner, more resilient organizations–even if that means making our traditional tasks redundant.
In the end, perhaps the true satisfaction lies in knowing we’ve built a better, more efficient process–one that serves not only our love of Excel but also the greater goal of organizational excellence.
This is a podcast by Hiran de Silva. Narrated by Bill.
Add comment