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That’s the point, why spend a week on some fancy web app if excel is already there?

In terms of UI, maybe, but not in terms of data.

I've seen it countless times. Somebody sends an excel file over e-mail and it is either an old outdated version of the file, or the persons that receives it hangs on to it for months as a source of reference.

With shared spreadsheets, this should become less and less of an issue going forward I would think.

With a conventional LAN with a fileserver, it is already easy to keep one spreadsheet. I don't think people can edit it together.

MS Access is much better for allowing simultaneous editing, especially (IIRC) if it's backed by an RDBMS, since it will use row level locks.

My previous employer had several databases with read-only web interfaces, but Access editing interfaces. They're very fast to develop, and support all the usual database features (constraints, keys, search etc), and could be set to load a form-editing view by default.

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