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Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

Another trend I noted after sitting in on a VC pitch: Look where people use Excel as some sort of database/process management system because an existing app isn't there or just sucks. That probably spells out opportunity. The world's most used database isn't Oracle or MySQL, it's Microsoft Excel...

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I work in enterprise software, trying to improve it one company at a time, and the biggest niche I see for excel is bypassing existing security mechanisms or procedures. We tend to expose data to users in a secure manner based on roles or authorities. But once users can export the data into excel, all of those security mechanisms are bypassed and they can send the data to other people or take it home.

I've even seen instances where excel exports are used as disaster recovery mechanisms.

Excel is perhaps the single largest development tool used (mostly by people who don't think they are developing anything.)

I keep wondering what a next-generation replacement might look like?

Also look for places where small businesses use paper :) My fiance and I started a salon together and we started out using an appointment book and client rolodex to track their customers because the software all sucks.

Two months later, I built some software for it with some friends and now we're getting close to being able to launch it to the world :) Every day I walk by 2-3 barber shops and salons in NYC without computers or with old Windows 3.1-esque programs.

It seems like another major use for Excel is its ability to allow people type text in tables. That's using a big hammer for a rather small nail.

This fails in Word--it tries to make the table fit onto a printed page--about 6" across. It doesn't work very well in my [old] copy of Dreamweaver.

This is something I've noticed before, and I'm not the only one - it's number 22 on pg's list of "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" from a couple of years back: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Also, SharePoint "surveys" as quick&dirty data entry forms. Kind of a modern-day Microsoft-centric version of the venerable FormMail script.

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