> I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather than what they do now which is teach classes in excel. Imo the entrenchment in excel is rooted in ignorance to other (often simpler) options available with python or R, than in any actual critical proprietary features offered by excel.

Every time a business user sits at a computer, are they going to spend 10 minutes getting it done, or 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get pip env configured so they can maybe eventually get it done? If by some miracle they are supernaturally gifted at programming and succeed after some weeks, they now have:

  - a nonstandard file format that will eventually break 
  - no real time feedback of formatting or calculation as they input/manipulate data 
  - no charting 
  - no GUI 
  - no "undo" button 
  - no import wizards 
  - no support (but I guess someone light years ahead of any dev talent I have ever seen wouldn't need it)

And all of this for a single use case.

Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Excepting the awful ribbon UI redesign, you could take any Excel 97 user, put them in front of the latest M365 version, and they could get the same work accomplished in the same amount of time.

You cannot say the same thing about almost anything else in the tech industry. Excel is terrible in a lot of ways. But it's a mostly reliable tool, has worked approximately the same way for 25 years, so people are going to use it and teach it. There's no point in wasting someone's valuable time with the horrifying fragility of the python/R/whatever ecosystem.