Who? Almost anyone who wanted to get something done without going through the red tape of working with IT. Even in a private corporation that red tape is enough to make many a things end up in excel (or for the more tech savvy, access). Government is surely even worse (better?) at having red tape so the pressure was likely stronger.
Yes exactly. An endless battle: IT want to stamp out spreadsheets and centralise everything but it all becomes an ossified bottleneck of development projects. Meanwhile people need to get stuff done so they use Excel.
