the major issue the parent eluded to was a sort of sunk cost fallacy that exists in the spreadsheet ecosystem.
Excel is great software, truly, what it enables people to do is impressive (and awful sometimes).
But once you have convinced yourself that its industry standard, why look as deeply into alternatives to even figure out if there are better tools? all of them will have quirks, some will certainly be more powerful in some areas (google docs has the ability to read data direct from bigquery for example).
Many already convinced themselves that excel is the one true format and there is no reason to look hard at anything else.
Others don't want their investment in learning to be wasted.
Theres a lot of people who are genuinely not incentivised to look at the ecosystem critically.
> But once you have convinced yourself that its industry standard, why look as deeply into alternatives to even figure out if there are better tools?
I suppose that's true to an extent. However one of the reasons spreadsheets in general are so popular is their fluid accessibility. Just about anybody can get right to work even in Excel. Once you've gotten started in Excel there's little incentive to leave. That it offers a full blown powerful programming environment (which is definitely not the best in almost any area) erases much reason to seek alternatives. It's not a situation where Excel is meaningfully less accessible than the alternatives.
> Many already convinced themselves that excel is the one true format and there is no reason to look hard at anything else.
I mean this is sort of true. It's simple enough and good enough and actually insanely powerful on top of all that. What is the compelling reason to even seek an alternative? (saying this knowing full well that people often do, and usually it's Sheets).
And lack of external data sources is not a small potatoes feature (speaking in reference to Numbers here) - I think that alone puts Excel and Sheets way above Numbers. (And personally I can die happy not seeing another line of AppleScript for the rest of my days).
At least GSuite gives you browser accessibility - and even Excel to a large extent. Numbers ties you to the Mac desktop and iOS crowd. That seems like an already poor incentive to switch. It's great that it works for some people - but it's a niche product, where Excel simply isn't, period.
To be completely fair though, Excel on MacOS is truly not the same software as Excel on Windows; which you will notice very quickly if you're a power-user.
Excel is great software, truly, what it enables people to do is impressive (and awful sometimes).
But once you have convinced yourself that its industry standard, why look as deeply into alternatives to even figure out if there are better tools? all of them will have quirks, some will certainly be more powerful in some areas (google docs has the ability to read data direct from bigquery for example).
Many already convinced themselves that excel is the one true format and there is no reason to look hard at anything else.
Others don't want their investment in learning to be wasted.
Theres a lot of people who are genuinely not incentivised to look at the ecosystem critically.