[joshuajomiller]

-"You've built a web app, but your users stick to Excel" I feel that if your users are not using your web app, it's not because they miss the (dated, not exactly intuitive) Excel interface. Seems to me like the wrong solution for the problem

[robbiejs]

For a fintech startup I was working for, that was the feedback our sales team got. "We like the product and it looks impressive, but we're used to Excel and we like to use Excel". So that's when we decided to add a page in our web app that had an Excel-look. That did not change things, the product vision was wrong, just like you said. But I can imagine that more web app producers get exactly this feedback from their prospects.

[barnabee]

I miss many things about the Excel interface in early every web app:

- editing many records as a table

- formulae for calculating values

- ability to paste from other tables or Excel sheets

- information density!

- arbitrary sort and filter

- hiding and rearranging columns

- etc…

Every app with search, including search engines themselves, and most with data entry should have an Excel-like, table based interface. GitHub discovered this (just look at their new projects) and most data focused apps are no exception either. Terminal utilities, Python scripting, and JSON are sometimes as good or better, but more often a poor second place.