[laughinghan]

Data normalization, ACID (transaction integrity), indexes, server-side validation, roles (user access levels), etc. take more effort to put into a spreadsheet (or add work-arounds for) than a regular CRUD stack (such as LAMP).

All those things take less effort if you already know how to use Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Python. If you don’t, but do know how to use a spreadsheet, it takes vastly less effort to do those in a spreadsheet than to learn how to do those with a LAMP stack.

And there are orders of magnitude more people in the latter group than in the former, and their time generally costs much less on the open market.

Which, to be clear, I don’t think is a good thing! Doing those things with a spreadsheet is worse in every way—effectiveness, maintainability, you name it—except this one way. But it’s usually the only one that matters.

My dream, coming soon to an Internet near you, is to “democratize” the things that come easy to us “real programmers”.