It’s nothing to do with fear, it’s down to cost, practicality, experience and security.

The one thing these people are not afraid of is change. Every senior management resource within every medium to large business wants to implement change.

And pay the additional licence? Why?

As a data consultant, I would say those companies already do question the process, and have done for decades.

Yes there are countless situations where a dedicated system or database could and should replace Excel, but there are just as many scenarios where Excel is ideal, and swapping out a spreadsheet for what would be potentially tens of separate applications across the business, or one absurdly expensive behemoth, to perform tasks that could be done rapidly and clearly in Excel is neither practical nor economically viable for most companies. A spreadsheet is perfect for plenty of situations.

My job is literally to help these companies move to appropriate database solutions, often transitioning away from Excel. But there’s no getting around that a spreadsheet solves (often simple) problems that are impractical with other tools. You can move a company to a supplier’s sector-specific solution and solve huge numbers of issues, but unless that solution exactly meets every aspect of the business requirements, there’s always going to be a fallback and it’s often Excel, for better or worse.

This is a Ken M level conversation and I love it.

I can only assume anyone still asking the question “is Excel really that much better than the alternatives?” lacks exposure to Power Query and its prevalence in business.

The best place for people with no knowledge of the fediverse to learn about it, is on the platforms they use now.

Absolute top class comment.

Well they do, but the actual reason given on the subsequent screen was down to when my Apple ID was set up.

Looks like they do it either way.

I installed this last night and was presented with a warning screen saying that I’d have to provide ID, then the following screen basically said “Nah, you’re good bro, we don’t need your ID”.

I’m hoping that was as a result of my Apple ID having been set up many years ago, rather than them having seen my camera roll and concluded that this guy is clearly old as fuck.

Demonstrate

But once you make the wrong noises about something, plenty of people show up ready to prove just how mean and horrible they can actually be.

This is true. Linux isn’t my platform of choice, and the “passion” of the responses that provokes is remarkable.