[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.