[raxxorrax]

Entirely true. Many physicists also basically live in Excel. And replicating the functionality of pivot tables isn't at all trivial and they also have a lot of helpers by now. In many cases you just need to click it and have all column neatly formatted so that you don't have to do much anymore.

I also have seen Access applications with more features than a common Salesforce CRMs. I have seen it as a navigation system that could bring you to the nearest partners or shops that provide necessary parts. Yes, there is code of doom behind it and if those maintainers leave the company, problems arise. But the feature set was often extremely hard to beat.

And I am not sure how to respond to non-technical users about better alternatives. They use it as a front end for SQL manipulation and it isn't easy to come up with something better for that target group.

Even worse is SharePoint. It is a complete abomination, it can easily beat most horror novels. But the workflow engines are just extremely practical for corporate processes. Only recently some alternatives came to the market... I just wish I could kill it...