I find people often use Excel (or Access if they're brave) when they have a known problem and can visualise the solution in something they know, like Excel. The crucial factor is implementation time. They can open an Excel and start work immediately, or wait weeks or months going through a lengthy and complex IT procurement process that will take from their budget. So in most cases starting with Excel is a no-brainer. Same reason why a lot of stealth IT gets implemented.
It's often only after years of a business using what has become sacred & business critical Excels, that somebody suggests formalizing it into software. In a business with an IT function, or a consultancy looking for business, it should always be somebody's job to find these Excels and replace them with something more robust.
> Same reason why a lot of stealth IT gets implemented.
Honestly, I miss the days of writing VBA macros which save hours of work a week and being sneered at by the 'official IT'.
I worked in a team in a large commercial bank handling reconciliations with various funds. Some of which had to be contacted by phone to confirm the current holdings. We had a system which would import our current positions and take imports in various formats from funds. Somewhere around 40% of the differences where due to trades which had been executed over the reconciliation date. I wrote a VBA script which pulled in all of the differences and identified trades which where open over the period and automatically closed the discrepancy with a reference to the trade IDs.
Another time I wrote a VBA script which would take a case ID and look it up in a diary system (at the time the only way I found to do this was to use the Win32 APIs and manually parse the fields in the HTML from the system), it would then enter this at the top of a spreadsheet which had to be completed. People liked it so much I had to rewrite it so that it would work on a list of case IDs and automatically print out the checklist.
Much more fun than figuring out why Kubernetes is doing something weird for the 3rd time this week.
It's often only after years of a business using what has become sacred & business critical Excels, that somebody suggests formalizing it into software. In a business with an IT function, or a consultancy looking for business, it should always be somebody's job to find these Excels and replace them with something more robust.