I think you're underestimating how many businesses rely on Excel alone.
There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.
As Google's JavaScript API also doesn't work in open office and whatever else they all have in extra layers.
However i am not sure when and why I encountered such a software last time, but my dad is a Visual Basic guy and has done a lot of these weird sheets for internal business stuff.
macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration
I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Office ecosystem and the tight integration in enterprises.
> I'm sure this is trivial [...].
nope.
But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)
>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.
I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.
Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.
The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.
Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.
CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters
PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web
A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz
Which is 5% of its users probably.
--- start quote ---
The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")
--- end quote ---
vs.
--- start quote ---
How much data have we collected?
- About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)
- Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080324235838/http://blogs.msdn...
--- end quote ---
I wish there were more recent studies on this, but they would paint the same picture
Sure Photoshop and Gimp both edit pictures, but the workflow is so different that professional users of Photoshop aren't going to switch just because it's FOSS.