I hate Excel for many reasons but it is king for a reason.
30% of my jobs when I was in integration was unfucking folders of folders of irregular xls built by users, and sometimes we just failed due to the sheer amount of crap which was in motion and had to be transitioned atomically. It never worked first and second time, so we had to do waves of complex transitions with parallel accounting (double workload on an already suffocating business), until things failed rarely enough to be scheduled as regular bug fixing tasks.
Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.
We have software that does what is needed. An ERP, a CRM, a HMI, a case management system for legal etc. No need to have everyone on every team rebuild that in excel.
Excel is near universal and flexible. It’s not a hammer. It’s a swiss army knife.
If your job is to manage legal cases, you have no business writing case management software. That includes writing it in excel.
The same goes for collaborating with 100 people outside of your team, they are not going to keep tracking your personal DIY projects, they work with a common infrastructure so it's actually feasible to work instead of being busy playing engineer all day.
