Introduction

In Part 1 we confirmed that EUC is the prototype of citizen development and that Kami Excel embodies it. The next question is simple: Was Kami Excel really “the bad guy”?

The answer is no. Kami Excel itself was not evil. It was a savior that delivered a dramatic productivity boost on the frontline. Its fall into “negative legacy” stemmed not from Excel’s limitations but from the lack of organizational management and the low level of IT literacy in society.

Look deeper and Kami Excel becomes a label of mockery coined by later generations. Had we lived in a society where everyone could understand formulas and VBA, it might have remained an ideal rapid-automation platform.

Context: During Japan’s bubble-era and post-bubble decades, many business units were left to fend for themselves. The people who assembled Kami Excel were often accounting or sales staff working unpaid overtime. Their workarounds were celebrated internally, yet the broader corporate culture offered little training or staffing to turn those prototypes into formal systems. That imbalance is what made the term “Kami Excel” sting.

The full series

Why Kami Excel was a savior

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many Japanese companies faced an uncomfortable truth: their information systems divisions could not support every business process.

  • IT talent was perpetually scarce.
  • Core systems were rigid, and even minor enhancements took months.
  • Day-to-day operations changed constantly; speed was survival.

In this environment Excel became a powerful emergency tool. Frontline teams built input forms, automated calculations with formulas, and crafted macros when needed. They could “stop the bleeding” themselves without waiting for IT.

Kami Excel was therefore a weapon that frontline teams wielded to break through the bottleneck of corporate IT.

Where the name “Kami Excel” came from

Crucially, nobody at the time called their spreadsheets “Kami Excel.” To its creators, Excel was a lifesaver, a clever hack, or a testament to workplace grit.

The term spread later. When highly personalized files remained after their creators left and no one could decipher them, people began to use the term sarcastically. Kami Excel is thus not a label rooted in the problems frontline workers faced, but a retrospective jab added by later observers.

At heart, it was a “readable system”

Excel formulas and VBA are not mysterious cryptograms. With basic IT literacy, anyone can read them.

If society had embraced the idea that “reading and writing formulas is normal,” Kami Excel would have remained a transparent automation device that frontline teams could iterate on together. In other words, Kami Excel could have been the ideal productivity tool—but literacy gaps turned it into a paradoxical villain.

How the savior became negative legacy

Reality, of course, played out differently:

  • Even trained engineers sometimes avoided Excel-specific functions and VBA.
  • Files that “anyone should be able to understand” gradually became untouchable black boxes.
  • Later generations could only point and sneer, dubbing them Kami Excel.

Kami Excel was not Excel’s fault. It was a mirage created by the lack of education and governance.

The path to negative legacy

Over time the improvised weapon turned into organizational risk:

  1. Bloat and black boxes — Thousands of cells filled with formulas made the whole picture invisible.
  2. Personalization — Once the creator changed jobs, the knowledge vanished.
  3. Lack of governance — IT considered them “rogue tools,” leaving security and audit issues unaddressed.

Kami Excel thus became unavoidable negative legacy for the organization.

Technical limits fanned the flames

Excel itself had structural limitations that amplified the black-box effect:

  • No schema: Without database-like constraints, columns multiplied chaotically.
  • No version control: Files were copied endlessly, with no consolidated history.
  • Little operational design: Access control or transactional integrity were absent, weakening its suitability as a true system of record.

Running core business on Excel was a stretch; exceeding its boundaries accelerated the Kami Excel phenomenon.

The enduring structure history reveals

The history of Kami Excel teaches us that “short-term rescue” and “long-term debt” are two sides of one coin.

Remember, though, that the term itself is a later-age jab. In a society with widespread IT literacy it would have remained a hero. It was never just a failure story; it was a tale of frontline pioneers whose achievements nobody institutionalized.

That reality has not changed. Society will not magically gain universal IT literacy overnight. Hence, as we adopt modern no-code, low-code, and RPA platforms, we must resist repeating the same structure.

Saviors and legacy generators are always separated by a paper-thin margin. That is the historical lesson we cannot forget.

Next: The Light and Shadow of Modern Citizen-Development Platforms (Part 3 of 7)