When Excel Stops Working: A Real Story from the Other Side

You probably have three giant spreadsheets open right now. The kind with color-coded tabs you invented, named ranges you can’t remember, and a VLOOKUP your whole team is afraid to touch.

You know that file.

This session is about the moment that file finally stops working, and what one customer did about it.

Ken Black is a Performance Motor Sports Data Scientist at General Motors. Today he runs analysis on billions of rows of race data across NASCAR, IndyCar, IMSA, and F1. Before that, he was an Excel guy. He wrote 50,000 lines of VBA for one company’s design-of-experiments software. He once got handed a spreadsheet that took 20 hours to open. After years of building in Excel, the work got too big and too fragile to keep going.

Joshua Burkhow, Chief Evangelist at Alteryx, sits down with Ken for an honest conversation about what that breaking point looked like and what changed after it.

You’ll hear:

• The exact project that broke Ken (a 30-year donations dataset across many disconnected files with no keys to tie any of it together)
• Why his medical analytics proof-of-concept couldn’t rerun when leadership asked to scale it, and why that was the real wake-up call
• How he caught a million-dollar data error in 10 minutes after a client swore the data was clean
• What “librarian work” he stopped doing once he stopped living in spreadsheets
• Where AI fits once you’ve done the foundational work

If you’ve ever opened a file you didn’t want to open or built a process you couldn’t rerun, this conversation will resonate.