Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. On top of that, we're also not going to have everyone do a little bit of PIM here and there, we stream 80 to 90 PIM mutations per second across various systems. You get a PIM frontend with appropriate access and that's it. Technically, the only real PIM work the teams do is corrections, there is practically no manual entry.
Luckily for us, we put request-response time in the requirements documents, so our PIM users get sub-50ms responses for everything.
As for sharing data, our manufacturers and subcontractors use APIs (with the exception of some wanting JSON uploads via SFTP), most of them stream directly into their PIM or ERP (yes, some don't have dedicated PIM systems and just use their ERP for that).
Even if we could have the data flow through individual workstations, we'd still not do that as we don't want to legal and repetitional risk associated with that, especially since it is completely avoidable.
As written in a different reply, sometimes people want to do some local fiddling around and they will export some data. But that data is considered expired, and not part of the normal data flow. Which was my point: spreadsheets are never part of the main loop. And anyone who wants to build a system where it is, is not working for us.
I do notice a trend here, lots of people having bad systems (slow PIM, outdated ERP, missing CRM), which is probably something that should be fixed, rather than taking the shadow route. Escaping to a spreadsheet is just that: escaping.
