[sodapopcan]

I'm butting in here because this struck a chord.

There are lots of people of people out there running highly profitable (and globally well-known) businesses off of Excel sheets. They have identified that they don't want to do this anymore as these sheets have grown so monstrously complex over the years that the employees who have to use them are miserable. Basically there is lots of opportunity to start a tech company whose sole purpose is to get much bigger businesses off of Excel. However, for reasons, this is much harder than it sounds.

[Kon-Peki]

As a counterpoint, a few months ago I helped out a small manufacturing company with their Excel overload. Every day, they start with a new document based on a template someone made years ago. Every shift has their own worksheet in the document, every machine and job has its own set of rows, with lots of columns for capturing relevant information.

Everyone there is used to dealing with it and for every use case except this particular one, it does what they need.

All I did was write a little program to consolidate data from many thousands of spreadsheets, do some aggregations, etc. allowing them to get better insight into scrap and downtime rates per machine and per contract.

I charged $500 for about 1.5 hours of work, and they were thrilled.

Anyway, what I wanted to point out was that totally eliminating Excel is, for many businesses, probably not worth the hassle and productivity problems associated with the switch. But you certainly can move complexity out of Excel and into a place where it is much more manageable. Reading/writing Excel files is ridiculously easy and doesn't need to occur on a machine with Office, or even Windows.

[sodapopcan]

I didn't mean to be so absolutist. Excel is often enough. I've worked with companies who are trying to ditch their Excel sheets but, in my experience, it's often a super hard problem to solve, especially if you are trying to generalize to sell it to multiple parties.

[DeathArrow]

It's not easy to find those excel users and ask them what they need.

[danjac]

I think you probably need to be embedded in the industry for a while so you have both a good handle on how the industry works and the connections to get a foot in the door with any new solution.

[MaxLeiter]

many of them don’t know what they need. I often think of the Ford(?) quote, “if I asked people what want they wanted they would’ve said faster horses”

[sodapopcan]

Ya, I worded that poorly. I didn't mean to say it's that easy to find them, but there are a bunch of them out there.