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My problem is that Excel is terrible. Its formula system is painful and the formulas are invisible.
It's not that a light user DB/spreadsheet program is a bad idea, it's that Excel made a lot of terrible decisions 20 years ago and now they're married to them.
Bespoke tools will be bought for tasks too complex or important for excel - finite element analysis, problems involving non-linear springs etc. Some time-consuming, repetitive tasks may also be deemed worthy of more automated tools, but on the whole the engineering industry is very much in the dark ages when it comes to modern software approaches. I often wonder what you'd end up with if you introduced a team of computer scientists into a civil/structural engineering company and told them to assist with analysis. I imagine you'd get some pretty innovative approaches to concept screening/design/cost-optimising etc.
In a typical non-IT company someone who needs to automate something has to wait for IT department to purchase software which would do the task. And very often it turns out that in software purchase process the purpose of that software is lost, requirments are comming from a wrong person and at the end that software is pretty useless.
It is not that someone can just download Python or Ruby or Java and start coding. No, no, company IT would never allow for this because they fear about security, patents, licences, etc. (and it does not matter that these doubts are not justified, very often it is just forbidden and that's all).
But chances are that such company has MS Office. Excel is just an interface to a better or worst programming languge. That's just better then nothing.
It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel. If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone could write a tool to show all the calculations being performed to get to a result. I'm giving this idea away for free because I'm pretty sure someone has already done it. Writing a new program from scratch has issues, too.
Even the built in features like cell naming are little known and little used by many spreadsheet creators, leading to avoidable mistakes.
There have been a number of efforts to build a better spreadsheet. One that I was quite familiar with (I bought a license!) was Resolver One [1] that was trying to build a spreadsheet with support for Python at the cell-level. Unfortunately it didn't take off, and the team moved onto Python Anywhere [2]. Excel clearly has strong network effects! I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were…
I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were responsible for the credit crunch That's a rather aggressive phrasing of what the article says, that many of the calculations involved in the credit crunch were done in Excel/VBA.
The author was (is?) a recruiter for quants and financial developers so he certainly had a unique perspective.
If anything, it's more a matter of using Excel correctly. Tools like slate for excel make it easier to audit spreadsheet especially other people's.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with the fact that Excel is used in so many cases - programming for non-programmers is important. My problem is that Excel is terrible . Its formula system is painful and the formulas are invisible. It's not that a light user DB/spreadsheet program is a bad idea, it's that Excel made a lot of terrible decisions 20 years ago and now they're married to them.
I can't really think of any off the top of my head, would be interested if you could share one or two that they're permanently married to.
However, I could make a very long list of easy to implement fixes & features they could add that would offer different ways of doing things than the braindead way you have to do things now, while still maintaining backwards compatibility. My conspiratorial theory is that MS is very well aware of all these things, and they will be released only if a legitimate competitor appeared on the scene, or slowly over time to encourage upgrades.