A Few Thoughts
It drives me nuts when tech journalists and Silicon Valley types underestimate how and why Excel is used so much in the industry. Reminds me of when I thought I had grammar licked in third grade because I knew about periods and capitalization.
I always imagine these guys having this mental picture that we all work for Northwind and run a bunch of three-column spreadsheets with columns like Customer, Orders, and Sales. With the default magenta and blue column graph over to the side showing the same data.
On the other end of the spectrum, is Excel used as a half-assed development platform too much? Yes. I’ve done it, as have most other power users in big companies. We do this because a native app or web app is an IT Project (insert sad trombone here) and requires a spec, scope, and budget simply to write the spec, scope, and budget. I do not kid here; we did this.
And in the end, if it’s house-built for less than a million or two, the native app or web app is generally just about as half-assed as the spreadsheet, just in more devious and permanent ways.
The problem is that Excel is a scaffold, not a building. But a well-built scaffold affords both flexibility and functionality. A poorly-built building affords neither.