[niftich]

Spreadsheets are the poor man's data processing pipeline; they ship with a wealth of numeric and data munging functions and give you an easy-to-understand visual representation of your datastore. You can use them to crunch numbers and graph, but also to implement fairly complex business logic, and they accomplish this within the confines of an application you probably have already bought anyway. They're the epitome of the entrepreneurial spirit you need to survive adversity in the SMB space.

Spreadsheets don't succeed outside of pure numerical calculations because they're that good, they succeed because they're versatile and ubiquitous, and everyone already has Excel or Google Sheets. If everyone already had, say, Sharepoint, or even some drag-and-drop no-cost rapid application generator that requires zero sysadmin skills to run, that would be the new baseline.

[snarf21]

I agree. The problem is also that most people who are running SMB aren't experts at growing their data model. Over time, the owner needs new objects (rows, columns, sheets, etc.) and new things that need calculated and tracked BUT they also need to associate these new things to the old things. They are not going to be able to renormalize the data model (they don't know they have). They make new sheets or Excel files and do the best they can. It is flexible and can do whatever they want but that doesn't make it more efficient. I don't think that most of these people need new or custom software. They need someone to come in once a year and help them re-optimize their processes against the new reality. Excel might be enough but there has to be an investment in making that an efficient tool.

[goatlover]

Sounds like someone should come in and turn that into a database that feeds excel.