In my last blog post, I outlined the profound transformation possible in enterprise Excel use—one that aligns with the real needs of management, not the performative tutorials dominating social media. I illustrated this transformation with four conceptual sketches and contrasted it with the reality of current practice. The central issue is that several constraints actively work against this shift.
These constraints include:
- Social media’s influence, which overwhelmingly targets beginners, not professionals or decision-makers.
- An industry ecosystem, built around current inefficient practices, which has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
- Voices of influence, such as Paul Barnhurst and others, who—intentionally or not—reinforce outdated patterns rather than challenge them.
In this post, I’m going to present four demonstrable case studies. These aren’t thought experiments—they’re real, concrete examples that show how Excel, in the hands of someone who truly understands it, can exceed the expectations and limitations imposed by traditional approaches and industry tools.
1. The “Gordon Ramsay” Experiment
In this exercise, both novice and experienced Excel users were asked to complete a basic task: collect data from 100 staff members, look up reference information, and produce a report.
Despite the task’s simplicity, 99% of participants approached it with cumbersome, manual processes. Only 1% took a radically different—and vastly more efficient—approach. The contrast was stark. Everyone who reviewed the submissions agreed: the 1% solution was vastly superior.
This underscores the key point: Excel can be transformed, but only if it’s used with expertise and vision. Otherwise, even seasoned users default to brute-force methods.
2. Annual Budgeting in Excel
There’s a persistent myth in the FP&A, ERP, and planning tool industry: that Excel cannot support bottom-up budgeting or effective consolidation. This belief has become a common refrain.
I’ve demonstrated not only that Excel can handle consolidation, but that it can meet a wide range of complex requirements management expects from a robust budgeting process. However, these solutions are only accessible if you truly understand Excel. For those who don’t, the process appears either impossible or prohibitively time-consuming.
This is the core theme of this article: whether Excel works or not depends entirely on whether you know Excel well.
3. The Budget Review Problem
Budget reviews are make-or-break for effective financial control. Yet they are notoriously hard to implement using FP&A tools, ERP systems, or even advanced Excel add-ons. Many professionals don’t even attempt to automate or optimize the process—they assume it’s a lost cause.
But it’s not. I’ve built a solution that requires only a few clicks—streamlined, efficient, and orders of magnitude better than traditional approaches.
Once again, we see that with deep Excel expertise, the “impossible” becomes routine. Without that expertise, the instinct is to default to expensive external systems or accept inefficiency.
4. The “Reg Call Handler”: Scaling Excel
This final example addresses the challenge of scale. A common perception is that Excel is fine for small, localized tasks—but incapable of handling large-scale operations. As scale increases, the assumption is that a custom system must be built to handle complexity.
The “Reg Call Handler” scenario demonstrates otherwise. While traditional Excel practices do crumble under scale, a radically different architecture—designed with Excel’s real capabilities in mind—delivers robust, scalable performance.
And yet, prominent voices like Mark Proctor, Paul Barnhurst, John Carroll, and others have not engaged with this example or its follow-ups, such as the “Eurovision Scoreboard” or the “Global Excel Airbus.” Their silence speaks volumes.
The reality is clear: if you know Excel deeply, you can solve the scale problem. If you don’t, you will mistakenly recommend multimillion-dollar systems to management—unaware that a better, cheaper, faster solution already exists.
What This Means for Management
These four cases—Gordon Ramsay, annual budgeting, budget review, and the Reg Call Handler—pose critical questions to leadership:
- What solutions are you choosing?
- What are you left with if your advisors don’t know Excel well enough?
- What are the opportunity costs of not understanding what Excel is really capable of?
These examples will be packaged and shared as practical challenges. They will serve as proof—tangible evidence that transformation is possible if we break free from the horse-drawn car mindset of current practice.
If you view Excel as just a digital piece of paper, you’ll never discover the engine under the hood. But if you know about the Panama Canal, the spray gun, or the hidden buttons that unlock automation—then you’re not painting a single purple square. You’re building a machine.
Conclusion
This blog supports and extends the ideas from the last post. The transformation of Excel from a tactical tool to a strategic platform is not theoretical. It’s demonstrable. It hinges on one thing: whether you truly know Excel or not.
So the question isn’t whether Excel can support transformation—it’s whether we will let it.
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