To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users...
I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first building the tools to do so-- and then automating the transformations, analysis, and presentation using some combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this process.
These people were trained in excel I assume, it's cultural and then you also have this weird pivot point like C where excel has reactive semantics, data table, ad-hoc input / modeling .. it's a massive reactive data notebook on steroid that requires next to no fiddling to get working.
Now as you point, things are changing.. R/julia/numpy/notebooks, reactive web frameworks.. can all suck some use case from excel. I believe that future clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web.
Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web
Yep, they would be. Although I think they're trying push the whole Power Apps model. Which, I'll admit, is an interesting ecosystem, but something on the desktop to enhance excel power users that will never have their needs satisfied by Power Apps would be beneficial. But possibly also eat into the user base that might be enticed into Power Apps instead, and the steady stream of monthly revenue from Power Apps clouds resources usage is preferable ( to MS ) than the "buy once" model for Office.
To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users...
I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first building the tools to do so-- and then automating the transformations, analysis, and presentation using some combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this process.