[antasvara]

I think this highlights the main issue with replacing Excel, which is that most people have an undocumented, informal workflow with their tools in Excel that would be difficult to replicate fully in other software.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

As someone that has had other software tools replaced with alternatives (think Slack replaced with Teams), the new solution almost always speeds up and fixes a lot of problems. It also invariably screws up at least one thing that I need the tool to do as a part of my job.

I love my IT colleagues, but (and I mean no offense to them or other IT folks) they don't understand that the way we use our internal tools is super flexible and doesn't adhere to an end to end process. It's how we ended up with an entire software platform that takes more manual steps, breaks in a way that we can't fix, and still requires the use of Excel to get the output into the formats that our stakeholders need. It also can't adapt quickly when we need to change things in our process.

It is a technically impressive tool that does the things they designed it to do super well. But we're like a month away from needing an Excel tool (or another piece of software) that can reliably do all the things we didn't realize relied on the "hot spacebar" from the XKCD.