Db and programming language will give you a backend. You'll still need a front end to display the info, and Excel is great at that. Not to mention you can send an Excel file by email, but you can't just send Docker containers to your clients and colleagues to run your spreadsheet.
Or just send the payload exported as JSON/CSV. We keep all kinds of project-relevant information in Word-/Excel-documents even checked into source control - plus these documents are used as a means to poll data from the customer. I'm actively fighting this terrible practice by writing some simple CRUD UIs (currently with React, but .NET would be a good choice too), to be able to transform project parameters influencing application configuration on our and on the customer side.
I’ve wondered on more than one occasion how many business problems could be solved much more quickly by just using excel as the front end gui/view instead of using some heavy weight client technology or worse, a web app.
- The XLS was used by multiple teams, from multiple sites, from multiple projects. It drove project-level decision making at the VP level. The person who wrote it was a genius, but there was no documentation or commenting, and over the decade after he left, it bloated Akira-style: many grubby hands had perverted it beyond its original use.
[Imagine if someone had written the most beautiful C++ & Boost (or C & GLib) numerical methods code, and then some boner noob came along and inserted their own bubblesort because they didn't understand Boost ... yeah, that kind of perversion.]
But because it was so important, and fed so many OTHER spreadsheets, it remains like a brain tumor pressing up against a spot so vital it could not be removed. I did a partial conversion to JavaScript and a MongoDB, but that was roundly shat upon because the main users weren't programmers and refused.
This is how very large companies work. (Most of the time.)
Because there’s too much overhead, it’s too hard to share, and the benefits don’t show up until the problem is more complex than most people ever need.
I mean with a Python and Jupyter Notebook workflow it is incredibly easy to share the work and understand what's going on if there's base level of knowledge.
All the simple formula stuff and basic data handling (using Pandas) would be incredibly easy to learn for pros at Excel.
