All the strong arguments for keeping excel usually boil down to "well, we built this giant thing using proprietary MS scripting/plugins/db access that we're too entrenched in it so it won't work on Google (and should probably be done in an actual programming language anyways)"

I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.

> I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features.

PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.

> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.

Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.

> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.

You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

> Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.

The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.

> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.