Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?
If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
If the finance team suggested you have to write all of your code in C using Emacs would you be OK with that?
But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
Not only that, software nerds are rediscovering that they can build so much in Excel. You don't need an app for everything.
>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]
TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.
Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes
Sure, but they also use accounting software, not Excel.
> Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes Sure they do, but they use testing and typed languages etc.
The problem with Excel is comma vs dot, locales, fat fingering, out of range errors, too easy to change a cell formula by mistake etc.
I know plenty of people who think they do. I know a few that cost the world economy about a trillion dollars: https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-spreadsheet-error...