Have you ever used Notion? Feature-wise, it has nothing to do with spreadsheets, so the comparison with Excel is irrelevant. Comparing it to Notepad is only remotely applicable in that both could be used to take notes.

As to why it is so popular: despite its faults, it offers a very slick experience for note taking, building a knowledge-base/wiki and project management and anything in-between really. I find the way you can store data in a structured way using Notion databases and present it in different forms very useful.

My work uses notion. We have to write a lot, and I need to write a lot of mathematics. Writing math on notion pages is like pulling teeth.

Till last year, I was writing my docs in markdown on my computer (using emacs), and then uploading using this library for markdown-to-notion-import [1]. But the notion api has changed, and the library no longer works, and I am not sure what to do now.

[1] https://github.com/Cobertos/md2notion

A better comparison would be Obsidian or Logseq.

If you are trying to do those things on Excel... geez.

I don't love Notion for some things, but I haven't found anything better for mixing structured data and notes in a flexible-but-consistent way.

If I wanted to do something like their databases (large sets of notes with enforced fields of different types including relational links, tags, attached files, with dead easy data entry, autocompletion, search and extraction, all presented in an acceptably pleasing way) in Excel, it would take me hours of tweaking. In Notion, it's 10 minutes before I'm starting to enter data (not to mention the price).

It is multi-functional. You can make it behave like spreadsheet, notepad, or database. All in the same document. So a better question might be "Why use Excel?"

My team uses Notion and I begrudgingly adopted it. I'm not one to dictate.

The UI is clunky. It's not as bad as Atlassian software, but it makes me miss Google Docs.

I'm hoping Gsuite grows ticket and wiki support, because then I can use Gsuite for everything.