The Demonization of Excel: A Deliberate Misdirection or Sheer Ignorance?

For over two decades, the IT industry has been waging a relentless war against Excel. Every new FP&A, planning, and enterprise performance management (EPM) tool arrives on the scene with the same tired battle cry: “You can’t do this with Excel!” White papers, product pitches, and marketing campaigns all paint the same picture—Excel is an outdated, inefficient, chaotic tool that belongs in the past. The latest and most egregious example? Workday Adaptive Planning’s white paper “Nine Circles of Excel Hell,” which goes so far as to compare Excel usage to Dante’s depiction of eternal damnation.

This isn’t just a passing trend; it’s an orchestrated attack that has snowballed into an industry-wide norm. But let’s take a step back and ask a fundamental question: What exactly are they comparing their products to?

A Dishonest Comparison

The common argument goes something like this:

1. Excel is slow, disconnected, and prone to errors.
2. Excel lacks enterprise-wide collaboration capabilities.
3. Our cloud-based solution is the only way forward.

These claims are not just misleading; they are deeply dishonest. They rely on a deliberate misrepresentation—comparing their high-end enterprise solution, designed and implemented by professionals, not against Excel in the hands of experts, but against Excel in the hands of untrained novices.

It’s like a professional Formula 1 team advertising their car by saying, “A regular person can’t win a race in a Toyota Camry.” Well, of course not. But put an experienced driver in a high-performance version of that Camry, and suddenly the results look very different.

Excel Is an Enterprise-Ready Solution—When Used Correctly

Here’s the truth: Excel is not the problem. Poor implementation is.

For over 30 years, Excel has been fully capable of supporting enterprise-wide FP&A, planning, and reporting through a hub-and-spoke architecture—a structure that mirrors what modern cloud solutions claim as their revolutionary advantage. In fact, since the rise of client-server models in the 1990s and cloud-based architectures in the 2000s, Excel has had seamless integration with databases and cloud storage.

Storing Excel data in a cloud-based database? That’s a 30-minute lesson for anyone willing to learn. Synchronizing and automating workflows across multiple departments? Already possible in Excel. Creating powerful, dynamic dashboards and real-time reports? Done.

So why do FP&A vendors pretend this capability doesn’t exist?

Are They Ignorant or Are They Lying?

There are only two explanations for this consistent misrepresentation:

1. Ignorance: If Workday and other FP&A vendors genuinely don’t know that Excel can function as an enterprise-class tool, then they are fundamentally unqualified to dictate best practices in financial planning. This would expose a shocking lack of understanding of enterprise requirements, process architecture, and IT capabilities.
2. Deception: If they do know, but continue to push this false narrative, then the entire basis of their marketing strategy is built on a lie. They are deliberately misleading businesses into believing that Excel is inherently incapable of meeting enterprise needs—when in reality, the only problem is poor implementation by inexperienced users.

Either way, it raises serious credibility questions about the industry’s thought leaders.

The Real Reason They Attack Excel

The demonization of Excel isn’t about its capabilities. It’s about control.

Enterprise software companies thrive on vendor lock-in. They want organizations to depend entirely on their proprietary ecosystem—one where pricing, upgrades, and customizations are dictated by them. Excel is a threat to this business model because it gives companies autonomy.

With Excel:

• You own your models and data.
• You control your architecture and integrations.
• You choose how and when to upgrade.

With a cloud-based FP&A tool:

• Your data is locked in their system.
• Customization is limited to their feature set.
• Pricing can escalate as your needs grow.

The relentless attack on Excel is not about solving enterprise challenges—it’s about forcing companies into a dependency model they can’t escape.

The Conversation We Should Be Having

Instead of pretending that Excel is some chaotic mess of disconnected spreadsheets, the industry should be asking:

• Why are so many organizations still relying on Excel, despite decades of aggressive marketing from FP&A vendors?
• What are FP&A vendors failing to deliver that keeps Excel relevant?
• How can organizations leverage Excel’s enterprise capabilities rather than abandoning it based on misinformation?

The reality is, Excel is not going anywhere. It has outlived countless “Excel-killer” tools and will continue to thrive because it puts power in the hands of professionals, not vendors.

So the next time you see a white paper demonizing Excel, ask yourself: Are they ignorant, or are they lying? Either way, why should you trust them?