I'm a computational biologist and Excel has been the bane of my existence for 20 years. We've "known better" for all of that time, but I still deal with people passing around Excel files of data or having common spreadsheets on shared drives (or now Dropbox shared). We all "know better", but Excel is often the first thing that people try to keep track of data, and once a system works, there is just too much inertia to change.

(For what it's worth, I feel the same way about people who try to send me RDS files with dataframes stored as R objects).

However, I think that whoever decided to name genes "OCT4" and "SEPT7" have to share some of the blame here too...