In a recent vlog, I reflected on a powerful concept triggered by Mynda Treacy’s video about creating a side hustle using Excel. While the video focused on earning more money with your Excel skills—whether by launching a service, building a product, or increasing the value of your current role—I believe the real, untapped opportunity lies deeper: transforming how spreadsheets are built and used across businesses.
The Real Opportunity: Transformation
If you’re familiar with my branding—“Triple Your Pay with Excel”—you know I’m speaking from experience in turning spreadsheet skills into serious value. In previous content, I’ve shared detailed case studies of transformational success. This time, I want to explore the why behind the opportunity for transformation—and the value of doing so.
To illustrate, I often use two visuals: a pie chart and a pyramid. These diagrams show us two things:
- Where the majority of important spreadsheet work happens.
- How our collective understanding and training are fundamentally misaligned with that reality.
The Excel Landscape: Pie Chart View
Let’s divide the world of serious spreadsheet usage into three parts:
- 90% – Enterprises: Large businesses where spreadsheets handle mission-critical operations like budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
- 8% – Small Businesses & Solopreneurs: Individuals running lean operations who use Excel as a powerful “sheet of paper” for tracking and reporting.
- 2% – Influencers: Social media educators creating Excel content, often focusing on flashy features and basic techniques.
Here’s the kicker: almost 100% of Excel education content online is aimed at that 8%, not the 90% where the biggest opportunity—and the biggest pain—exists.
Why It Matters: Paper Flow vs. Data Flow
Most people, especially in the 8%, approach Excel like it’s a digital notepad: a place to enter data, run some formulas, format it, and share it via email or a shared drive. This method is manageable when you’re a team of one—or two or three. But in an enterprise, this approach leads to chaos: version control nightmares, duplicated data, broken links, and what many of us call Excel hell.
What’s needed instead is an enterprise-grade mindset—one that treats Excel as a client in a hub-and-spoke, client-server architecture. This is not a new concept. In fact, it was the foundation of ERP systems developed 35 years ago. The idea is simple: store your data centrally, and have Excel (or any app) read from and write to that data source in real-time.
No more sending spreadsheets around. No more final_v3_FINAL.xlsx. Just seamless, bidirectional data flow.
Real-World Case Study: Lloyds Banking Group
At Lloyds Banking Group, a unit-wide program was initiated to identify spreadsheets deemed “not fit for purpose.” In no time, over 1,000 such spreadsheets were flagged. The common issue? They were all built as standalone files—a method fit for tiny operations, not a national bank. The solution wasn’t to replace Excel, but to re-architect how it was used—shifting to a centralized data model.
The Pyramid Problem
Let’s revisit the pyramid. At the base are beginners—novices with little to no understanding of enterprise process architecture. Social media content caters almost entirely to this group. Keyboard shortcuts, dynamic arrays, Power Query tips—these are useful in isolation but irrelevant or counterproductive in a collaborative enterprise setting.
In fact, most popular features being taught today are either workbook-bound or one-way in nature:
- Power Query is great for importing data—but can’t write back to a central system.
- Dynamic arrays, LAMBDA, XLOOKUP, Excel tables—all fantastic features, but limited to single workbooks.
- Python in Excel and Copilot are powerful, but again, designed for individuals—not enterprises with complex, multi-user processes.
These tools don’t scale for enterprise collaboration. And that’s the ceiling. Above it is the sweet spot of enterprise-grade skills—and below it lies the swamp of spreadsheet chaos.
Why Nobody’s Talking About This
Why don’t influencers talk about this transformation opportunity? Simple:
- It’s not flashy.
- It doesn’t sell as easily.
- Most influencers don’t work in enterprise environments.
They’re not wrong—they’re just serving a different audience. But for professionals in large organizations, following that path leads to more confusion, not clarity.
The Opportunity
The biggest opportunity in Excel today is to bridge the gap between beginner techniques and enterprise architecture. To take existing spreadsheet chaos and re-architect it into clean, centralized, collaborative systems. That’s the transformation. That’s where value is created. That’s how you triple your pay.
You don’t need a new ERP system. You need a new mindset.
Add comment