I don't work in tech industry but from my experience it's a lot simpler than that. Most of these day-to-day desk workers know nothing but excel because that's all they know from home and work.
I agree that most people just default to Excel. Mostly that's because there isn't really any competition and Excel is the default and even if there was competition, it would not matter because Excel has a low initial cost except when compared with free.
More subtly, Excel has a low lifetime cost because there are many good learning resources (and also many bad ones) and those resources are widely available. Which makes me think that one of the killer features of Excel is all the technical headroom it provides for solving problems...by which I mean there is usually functionality and features that could make an ordinary job faster...particularly repetitive ordinary jobs of the sort most people wind up doing.
Agreed. The thing about Excel isn't about the features. It's about the adoption across pretty every company in the world. It's in schools and it's used at work. When people become proficient in a tool, they are less willing to learn a whole new tool to accomplish basically the same thing Excel can. They will just ask the company to buy Excel. And it's cheaper to buy Excel than to pay for the employee to train on the new tool.
More subtly, Excel has a low lifetime cost because there are many good learning resources (and also many bad ones) and those resources are widely available. Which makes me think that one of the killer features of Excel is all the technical headroom it provides for solving problems...by which I mean there is usually functionality and features that could make an ordinary job faster...particularly repetitive ordinary jobs of the sort most people wind up doing.