What would the business world do without Excel? We sure as heck wouldn’t be as productive, or would we? Excel is a great way to structure data, do some manipulation and analysis, but it’s not an acceptable substitute for a well-designed system. The initial effort to build a system is immense, but pays off dividends in the long-run.
The big appeal Excel is the low learning curve. Data is neatly organized in rows and columns. It’s easy to change fonts, cells’ color, or anything about the looks. But I don’t care how much of a wizard you are in Excel, there’s just no way that you’re going to design a decent user interface. Excel wasn’t designed for it, and the effort to make that round peg fit into a square hole isn’t worth it.
The ease of use is deceptive. Because it’s seemingly easy to work in Excel, things aren’t always well thought out. Most of that’s because of the fundamental nature of Excel: a data siloed into a single file. Sure you can query data from a database, but organizations won’t always put the effort. Excel makes you feel agile, when you’re unwittingly running around in circles. A centralized system makes so many things easier to manage: data backup, data quality, reporting, analytics and information insight, etc.
One last rant: if your data requires one-to-many or many-to-many relationships, stop using Excel immediately. There’s just no good way to handle that in Excel, unless you’re willing to write your own DBMS, but at that point you can use MySQL, PostreSQL, SQL Server, or any other database system. Excel has its limited use in the world, but you gotta think thrice before you want to use it. Many times SharePoint and InfoPath could be your better solution.