There are SAAS solutions like airtable. https://www.airtable.com/
Hosted and managed databases in AWS, Oracle, and Azure.
As I mentioned it's best to get a good idea on what you're trying to do with excel, there may be a purpose driven web app designed to do exactly what you're looking to accomplish.
knowing both very well, i’ll try to help you choose:
retool is great when your logic and api calls are much more sophisticated. it is more powerful but also less turnkey. i’ve built apps that would have taken me several days in less than an hour and had the degree of control to make the workflow as i wanted it. the widgets are powerful and super configurable. the editing experience is meant for engineers or very savvy technical people with limited engineering experience.
airtable is more turnkey. you can more quickly build basic things. it’s used by a LOT of companies. the widgets and capabilities all work out of the box and are very simple and transparent. if something doesn’t work, it’s not hard to figure out why. the capabilities and how they’re implemented make it easy for non engineers to build a full blown workflow.
both are great so you should pick something medium complexity and try retool and something low complexity and try airtable. this will help you understand what’s going to be best for your company and use cases.
Why would you do this? Do you not have O365? It helps managing docs, collaborating, versioning and DLP.
Excel is very powerful. One of the biggest causes of tech people failing at product innovation is trying to sell a product that excel can already do to an audience that excel is already optimized for.
You may not like it and it may not feel very webby but "it ain't stupid if it works"
Perhaps you can elaborate on how you are choking, chances are O365 is already solving it . Combine Teams+OneDrive+Sharepointonline+MSIP and you have a solution that scales >100K users in a global org.
- process management system, usually web-based, and all business data is stored in the (central) DB. This could be specialized domain-specific solution, or organized with low-code tools like PowerApps, or even own software developed in-house (possibly, with help of outsourcing partner) - BI tools to replace use-cases when Excel is used for reporting/analytics (not data entering)
Migration can involve both these items, or only one of them. For example, if using Excel for data entering is still ok, but for reporting brings to much chaos (no single source of truth, it is possible to 'edit' or open outdated worksheet and have different numbers etc) - you may start with a BI tool that uses 'master' Excel file as a data source.
I was drawn to your post since I hate how much Excel is abused. People use a spread sheet where a simple table in a word processor or note taking app more than suffices. Unfortunately I see no way out of it. The replacements to Excel - i.e. other spreadsheet products have the same issue. Excel actually is probably the most mature of the lot with plenty of information to troubleshoot issues.
If you have a good dev team, with good UI design and dev skills, as suggested by @m348e912 you could create a quick app to serve specific purposes. You could also look into other low-code app platforms. These solutions may take a bit to do, but the end users will love it if done right.
Why do you blame Excel? Is it personal bias against declarative programming? Is it an anti-Microsoft bias?
How do you know it's not a business process issue bottlenecking things? We need more information to properly address this issue for you.
Also Sharepoint or whatever it’s called these days provides solutions for this type of thing. If you buy something then it’s just process changes and rollout and not 6 months or a year to build, test, etc.