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Sounds like their workflow is the problem, not their tool. I'm no shill for Excel, but it is without a doubt powerful and can be quite programmatic. Maybe Excel could get a plugin system like Atom or VS Code or Sublime that could handle integration with centralized platforms / databases.

Just wondering: can you make an API call / ORM query to a database from within Excel macros? How much I/O can you do with macros?

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You can do basically anything I/O within an Excel macro (VBA script):

You can talk to a database: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba-new-databas...

Interact with the filesystem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse-text...

Open arbitrary sockets, with some caveats: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock-winsock...

And more!

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