Hiran de Silva has developed a series of rigorous benchmarking challenges designed to evaluate different approaches to solving real-world enterprise problems using Excel. These challenges reflect the collaborative, multi-departmental nature of processes like budgeting, forecasting, and reporting—where spreadsheets are often the backbone of critical operations.
From these benchmarks, four distinct categories of Excel solution approaches have emerged. Let’s explore each group—A, B, D, and C—to understand their philosophies, strengths, limitations, and what we can learn from them.
Group A: The Intuitive Excel User
Group A represents those who approach Excel as it was originally conceived: a digital version of a large sheet of paper. These users intuitively model their solutions based on how they would handle the task with pen and paper, leveraging Excel’s built-in features like formulas, dropdowns, formatting, and multi-sheet workbooks.
While this method is often labor-intensive, it is also robust. Collaborators pass spreadsheets around manually—via email or shared drives—which inevitably leads to version control issues and data fragmentation. External links are frequently used, which can become fragile and difficult to maintain. Still, with patience and diligence, Group A’s approach gets the job done and continues to be widely adopted in practice.
Group B: The Power User Enamored with Features
Group B users are heavily influenced by modern Excel innovations such as Power Query, dynamic arrays, XLOOKUP, LAMBDA functions, Excel Tables, and even emerging tools like Python integration and Copilot.
These features promise streamlined workflows and impressive micro-level efficiencies. However, the benchmarking results indicate that while these tools may improve individual productivity, they don’t significantly enhance the manageability of enterprise-scale collaborative processes. Fundamentally, Group B still operates on standalone spreadsheets passed between collaborators—just like Group A—failing to solve the problem of fragmentation.
What’s more concerning is that many Group B adopters appear driven more by hype on social media than by real-world experience. This raises a broader issue: are popular Excel influencers recommending tools because they genuinely solve enterprise problems, or simply because they’re trending?
Group D: The Enterprise Architecture Purist
Group D embodies those who take a traditional Enterprise Architecture approach—implementing client-server models where data is stored centrally, and users access it via controlled front-end interfaces.
This hub-and-spoke model is proven and foundational across modern IT systems. It offers structural soundness, scalability, and centralized control. However, it comes with its own challenges: high cost, lack of agility, slow development cycles, and rigid workflows. Often, users find themselves reverting to spreadsheets anyway—both at the input and output stages—creating a hybrid mess that undermines the very purpose of the architecture.
As a result, many organizations question whether the detour through Group D’s “off-the-shelf” enterprise systems is even worthwhile, especially if it can’t flexibly meet actual business needs.
Group C: The Hybrid Innovator
Group C represents the emerging best-of-breed approach. These users have studied Groups A, B, and D and synthesized their strengths into a unified methodology.
Group C combines:
- Group A’s intuitive and agile spreadsheet modeling.
- Group B’s concept of data flow, especially as demonstrated through Power Query and dynamic integration.
- Group D’s client-server, hub-and-spoke model for managing collaborative, enterprise-wide processes.
In practical terms, Group C solutions establish a central database hub—cloud-based or local—and allow Excel clients to flow data in and out via lightweight, manageable connections (sometimes just a single line of code). This allows for true enterprise-grade collaboration with the flexibility Excel users love, without falling into Excel hell.
Examples of Group C in action include solutions for:
- Annual budgeting processes.
- Budget review workflows.
- Scaling spreadsheet models from department-level to company-wide use.
These implementations show that Group C’s approach is not just theoretical—it works, and it scales.
Educational and Practical Advantages
Group C’s methodology is surprisingly accessible:
- Easy to understand compared to the overwhelming syntax and quirks of modern Excel features.
- Simple to implement, often using familiar tools like Microsoft Access or cloud-hosted databases.
Establishing the central hub can take as little as 10–15 minutes on the cloud, or a few minutes on a shared drive.
Conclusion: The Future of Excel in the Enterprise
Hiran de Silva’s benchmarking initiative reveals a spectrum of approaches to enterprise spreadsheet solutions, each with lessons to offer:
- Group A teaches us about resilience and clarity.
- Group B reminds us of the value (and limitations) of feature-driven development.
- Group D demonstrates the importance—but also the pitfalls—of rigid architecture.
- Group C stands out as the most balanced, integrating the best of all worlds to enable scalable, collaborative, and agile spreadsheet-based systems.
In the end, Group C doesn’t just represent a method—it’s a mindset. It’s about understanding why things work, when to adopt certain tools, and how to construct sustainable enterprise solutions that align with both business needs and user realities.
That, in essence, is the goal of Hiran de Silva’s “Mission Impossible” benchmarking journey.
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