[warrenm]

So ... Excel instead of AirTable?

Excel is not the "best" tool for most of what it is made to do

But it is the available tool for the majority of people out there - it is plenty good enough to get most of what most people want to get done with it done ... so they use it

I remember in the late 90s using Excel (5.0, at the time) for a variety of statistical operations

...all of which I was informed by the in-house SPSS expert were "not possible to do" in Excel

Is importing your data into Tableau, or a database and using PowerBI, or into a time-series analysis tool like Splunk or ELK "better"? In the strict sense of the word ... probably

But the point remains: Excel is good enough to get it done

[jarirajari]

True, excellent point about the availability. But homemade sheets are often tools you built yourself for you and not tools that you can buy from a store.

I see AirTable as a rich UI client that sits on top of data - btw, back in the days rich clients was a thing. I am curious how people would use server that is able to do business logic.

[warrenm]

I do not know if it is still the case (because I have not looked in 15+ years), but there used to be all kinds of add-ons you could buy for Excel that had prebuilt forms, charts, macros, etc

[jarirajari]

Hey, thanks! Definitely need to look into Excel add-ins!!

[warrenm]

they were definitely a not-insignificant market in the 90s through mid-00s!

(I bought a couple back in the day, even)