Excel’s New Era Starts Now
This all-Excel strategy ends Excel scutwork, automates your reports and analyses, and frees your team to deliver high-impact insights—faster, with help from AI.
SUMMARY: Most Excel users are stuck in a loop of mindless copy-paste, brittle formulas, and late-night fixes. That loop ends here. The EDP Strategy replaces Excel drudgery with structured, automated, Power Query–enabled Flowbooks that update themselves in seconds. It frees up time, eliminates errors, and makes room for real analysis. With AI as your sidekick, even Excel novices can become ultra-productive, insight-generating professionals.
Most Excel work is broken. And most Excel users know it.
They just don’t know what to do about it.
Every period, the same routine plays out: open last period’s workbook, paste in new data, copy formulas, patch what breaks, scroll through tabs, send it off. And do it all again next week, next month, next quarter.
It’s slow. It’s brittle. It’s boring.
It’s scutwork and drudgery.
And in today’s AI-driven economy, it’s not just inefficient—it’s dangerous.
This kind of Excel work burns out professionals, buries insights, and wastes thousands of dollars per user, per month. It delays answers. It invites mistakes. And it makes you—and your team—look unproductive, fragile, and replaceable.
That’s the real risk.
The good news? There’s now a way out. A new strategy. One that replaces Excel scutwork with fast, automated, structured workflows that AI can amplify—and managers can trust.
The Excel Data Plumbing Strategy exists to end the scutwork, the delays, the burnout, and the waste—by replacing chaos with structure and brute force with automation.
Flowbooks: The Foundation of the EDP Strategy
The Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy replaces scutwork with brainwork—permanently.
At its core is the Flowbook: a carefully designed, Power Query–enabled Excel workbook that pulls in data, transforms it, and feeds clean results to any number of reports, charts, dashboards, forecasts, models, and so on.
Each of those outputs is called a Reflow. Because once your Flowbook is built, you can reflow fresh data to all of them—with a single command—period after period.
No more patchwork. No more last-minute scrambling. No more guesswork.
You replace Frankenbooks with Flowbooks.
This is Excel as it should be: structured, scalable, and shockingly fast.
This isn’t a workaround. It’s a redesign.
Why Most Excel Users Are Still Stuck in 2013
When Microsoft released Power Query in 2013, it was the breakthrough Excel had been waiting for. But most users ignored it. Or worse—bolted it onto their old Frankenbooks instead of using it to rethink the entire workflow.
That’s why Excel drudgery never went away.
The EDP Strategy fixes that. It doesn’t just use Power Query. It revolves around it. Every Flowbook is built to flow data cleanly from source to output with zero manual steps.
When your work is structured that way, your update cycle shrinks from hours to seconds. And your brain is finally free to do what it’s best at: solving real business problems.
From Scutwork to Brainwork
Accenture reports that FP&A teams spend 85% of their time on low-value production tasks. That’s Excel scutwork.
The EDP Strategy flips that ratio.
With Flowbooks doing the scutwork, Excel users spend nearly 100% of their Excel time on insight, strategy, and decision support.
And here’s the critical point: that shift isn’t just about speed. It’s about money.
Every hour spent on scutwork is an hour your company pays for but gets no business value from. Multiply that across teams, across periods, across headcount—and the opportunity cost balloons. We’re talking thousands of dollars per user per month lost to avoidable Excel work.
Flowbooks eliminate that waste and drudgery. And when you replace scutwork with brainwork, you don’t just catch up—you create.
You generate real value. You find what others miss. You show up differently to your manager, your team, and your company.
See How It Flows
A Flowbook is more than a workbook. It’s a complete data plumbing system.
This flowchart shows how data moves through it—like water:
Every reflow is an output: forecast, dashboard, financial report—whatever your team needs.
One refresh. Everything updates.
This is what structured Excel looks like. And once you build it, you’ll never go back.
GenAI Supercharges Flowbooks
ChatGPT and Copilot aren’t just productivity tools. They’re insight amplifiers. But they only work if your data is clean and your workflow is structured. When Excel is structured, AI doesn’t just assist—it accelerates.
Flowbooks give AI the context it needs to help you…
- Write better formulas
- Debug Power Query steps
- Brainstorm new KPIs
- Explain results with clear, professional language
AI without structure is noise. But Flowbooks make AI actionable.
What Happens When You Build Your First Flowbook
Everything changes.
Suddenly your reports update themselves. Your dashboards don’t break. Your forecast builds itself while you sleep.
You don’t waste time fixing errors—you use that time to make your manager look brilliant.
You stop fighting Excel. You start winning with it.
Why It Matters Now
The AI era is here. And the companies that survive it will be faster, leaner, and more insight-driven.
They won’t waste payroll on manual reporting. They won’t tolerate chaos in Excel. They’ll cut what slows them down.
If you’re still using the old way, your job isn’t just inefficient. It’s at risk.
The EDP Strategy is how you flip that risk into relevance.
Your Next Step Starts Here
Start your first Flowbook today. Stop grinding. Start building. Because in a world of shrinking headcount and rising AI, the only Excel users who survive are the ones who stop doing drudgery—and start delivering insight.
The EDP Institute is your way out.
Join the EDP Institute now.
