[brudgers]

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.