I work in manufacturing and I see Excel everywhere. Here's my two cents:
Excel is universal: I can share an excel sheet with Tim from accounting, Jessica from purchasing, Jared from the warehouse, Kathy on the shop floor, John from sales, and Kim from a vendor, and I can expect them all to be able to read and make changes to it.
Another important point is it's longevity. I often find myself opening cost sheets created 30 years ago, and they work without issue in the current version of Excel. I expect they'll work 30 years from now too.
Is it the optimum tool for all jobs? No, far from it, but I've yet to encounter a situation where it turned out to be a poor choice. (Note: Obviously your database shouldn't be in Excel, but you better have an "export to Excel" feature if you expect it to be useful to others.)
"Badly designed" and "not updated" are not unique problems to Excel and I'd argue it's a whole lot easier for most people to fix an Excel sheet than even, say, a python script.
Excel is universal: I can share an excel sheet with Tim from accounting, Jessica from purchasing, Jared from the warehouse, Kathy on the shop floor, John from sales, and Kim from a vendor, and I can expect them all to be able to read and make changes to it.
Another important point is it's longevity. I often find myself opening cost sheets created 30 years ago, and they work without issue in the current version of Excel. I expect they'll work 30 years from now too.
Is it the optimum tool for all jobs? No, far from it, but I've yet to encounter a situation where it turned out to be a poor choice. (Note: Obviously your database shouldn't be in Excel, but you better have an "export to Excel" feature if you expect it to be useful to others.)
"Badly designed" and "not updated" are not unique problems to Excel and I'd argue it's a whole lot easier for most people to fix an Excel sheet than even, say, a python script.