Is it Pandas based? I'm a bioinformatician and many of my data work flows start with pandas.read_excel() and end with pandas.DataFrame().to_excel(). I had some serious issues with it but I have come to terms with it. Actually Excel is ok as a central project "database" (up to certain size of course), anyone can quickly fill in a lot or rows (the smart dragging, the macro's that take in other Excel files, drop-downs for categories that I later use in Pandas/Seaborn...) and programmatically dealing with it is not too bad (pandas for bulk stuff, openpyxl for very fine-grained control and even conditional formatting, which we use a lot, etc).