Excel Users Nimble? You Bet! Here’s Why

SUMMARY: An all-Excel strategy—with help from ChatGPT or Copilot—transforms Excel from a time-consuming tool into a nimble platform. It does so by introducing modular Excel flowbooks, rapid iteration, and GenAI-supported workflows. It empowers users to adapt across time, topics, and tasks with minimal rework. This unlocks fast, flexible, and resilient reporting that thrives amid volatility. Managers benefit too, gaining real-time collaboration, alerts, scenario modeling, and trusted, on-demand reporting. Nimbleness becomes Excel’s new superpower. Here’s an introduction to the new strategy.

If you’re not nimble, you won’t last long in a volatile world. That’s true for companies, its managers, and its Excel users.

But Excel’s traditional, non-strategy strategy for reporting and analysis certainly keeps its users from being nimble.

Most Excel environments are fragile and overloaded with scutwork. They’re the last place you’d look for speed or flexibility. But the Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy turns Excel into a nimble platform—not by changing Excel itself, but by changing how we Excel users structure our workbooks.

Let’s take a closer look at what nimbleness means in Excel, why it matters, and how the EDP Strategy delivers it.

What Is Nimbleness in Excel?

Excel users are nimble when we can adapt quickly and effectively to changes in data, business conditions, decisions, or strategic direction. Nimble Excel users don’t just complete their work faster—they reframe it, revise it, and repurpose it as needs change.

Think of it as multi-dimensional nimbleness—the ability to adapt across time, topics, formats, and functions. Nimble Excel users respond to volatility with clarity and creativity. They don’t wait for IT. They don’t ask for extensions. They deliver.

How the EDP Strategy Builds Nimbleness

The EDP Strategy creates nimbleness by giving Excel Data Plumbers (Excel users who use the EDP Strategy) a structured way to flow data through their workbooks—from source to insight—with minimal rework and no copy-paste drudgery. Here’s how it works:

1. Modular, One-Command Workbooks (Flowbooks)

Excel Data Plumbers—or just “Plumbers”—build workbooks that follow a clean, modular architecture.

Each workbook uses Power Query to connect to internal and external data, flow it through well-structured tables and formulas, and generate Excel reflows—reports, dashboards, forecasts, etc.—that we can update with one command.

Those well-structured, Power Query–enabled workbooks are called flowbooks.

2. Flowbook Templates for Fast Starts

Plumbers rely on flowbook templates or copies of existing flowbooks that are connected to common sources, like GL data, economic indicators, public company financials, weather data, and so on.

Starting from a flowbook template or a flowbook copy means your new flowbook is nearly done before you even begin.

3. Minimum Viable Flowbooks

Plumbers often begin by creating Minimum Viable Flowbooks (MVFs). These are early versions of reflows that deliver value quickly.

Managers review them, provide feedback, and iterate toward what they really want—all in a fraction of the time traditional Excel reports and analyses take.

In fact, every flowbook—with its one or more reflows—is a permanent work in progress. Plumbers can modify them easily as needs change.

4. The Insight Flywheel

With the Excel Scutwork Strategy, each report, analysis, forecast, and so on is a separate project. And that means that the efficiencies of the learning curve and experience curve never have the opportunity to improve Excel productivity.

With the Excel Brainwork Strategy, on the other hand, all reflows—flowbook-automated reports, analyses, and so on—are essentially the same project. And that means that Excel Data Plumbers and teams of Plumbers become faster and more nimble with each new reflow they create.

5. GenAI as a Knowledge Partner

With help from GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, Excel users can fill gaps in their Excel skills, professional knowledge, and even their strategic framing.

GenAI is always available to troubleshoot, brainstorm, and explain.

The Result: Multi-Dimensional Nimbleness

When these elements combine, they unlock nimbleness across many different dimensions:

1. Temporal nimbleness: Users can generate useful outputs quickly, revise them quickly, and respond to change faster than any centralized tool or process.
   
   
2. Topical nimbleness: Plumbers can apply their subject-matter expertise to finance, marketing, HR, supply chain, or any area of the business—with support from AI for unfamiliar topics.
   
   
3. Structural nimbleness: Modular designs mean flowbooks are easy to tweak, extend, reuse, or debug—nothing is fragile or opaque.
   
   
4. Contextual nimbleness: Plumbers can display performance in the context of other internal and external data. That’s because flowbooks can connect to business and economic data so reports can reflect the business environment, not just internal performance.
   
   
5. Scenario nimbleness: Plumbers can adjust drivers, assumptions, parameters, or filters easily to explore multiple possibilities quickly and clearly. This can be particularly useful when you’re working with digital twins.
   
   
6. Visual nimbleness: Plumbers can adapt their visualizations quickly, from standard reports, to boardroom-quality reports, to infographics—each tailored to its audience.
   
   
7. Distribution nimbleness: Flowbooks support rapid publication to multiple formats—as workbooks, PDFs, interactive flipbooks, or even paper.
   
   
8. Language and unit nimbleness: Flowbooks can translate measures, formats, and terms dynamically, adapting to local currencies, units of measure, or even spoken language preferences.
   
   
9. Delegation nimbleness: Once the flowbook is built, any trained clerk or assistant can refresh, export, and distribute it. That means high-quality output each period doesn’t require high-cost talent.

This isn’t theory. Plumbers are doing this today—quietly transforming Excel users from overworked report generators into nimble insight creators.

What About Managers?

EDP doesn’t just build nimbleness in Excel users. It gives managers nimbleness, too.

1. Iterative Collaboration

Instead of specifying report needs upfront, managers can iterate through Minimum Viable Flowbooks with their Plumbers. They get what they want faster—even by seeing it and tweaking it in real time.

2. Targeted Insight on Demand

Do you need insight into a new risk, spike, or opportunity? Managers can ask a Plumber to zero in, and if a suitable template is available, get back a meaningful reflow quickly.

3. Alert Flowbooks

Plumbers can create flowbooks that can generate reflows only when a condition is met. No noise, no inbox clutter. Just awareness when it’s needed.

4. Auditability and Trust

Flowbooks have a clean, traceable structure. Managers can audit the logic, review the source data, and trust the results.

5. Scenario Exploration

Need to see what happens if sales slow 10%? Or if FX rates shift? Or if a recession strikes? Plumbers can support scenario modeling—quickly.

6. Delegation Flexibility

Reflow updates can be delegated to clerks or interns. That means managers get reliable output without tying up their top analysts—their Excel Data Plumbers.

In short, the EDP Strategy gives managers a fast-response support system that adapts as quickly as the world changes.

Why Nimbleness Matters Now

Nimbleness isn’t a luxury. It’s a response to a business environment defined in part by:

With all of these issues—and more—slow systems break. And slow people fall behind.

The EDP Strategy gives Excel users and their managers the speed of thought, the structure to support it, and the tools to act on it. And it generates significant value.

When disruption hits, the nimble rise. And with the EDP Strategy, Excel Data Plumbers become the most-nimble players in the room.

Turn Excel into your team’s agility engine—with the Data Plumbing Strategy. Join the EDP Institute today.