Spreadsheets exist because it would take programmers weeks to produce, what it would take a afternoon to do it in excel.

Plus most of the time these are one time throwaway efforts done to quickly arrive at results and make decisions.

It will all begin to make sense when we think of Spreadsheet work as programming and not something separate from it.

It's the dream Microsoft Access should've been, but for whatever reason never caught on.

Microsoft tried it a few times, the latest attempt was LightSwitch, recently killed in favor of PowerApps.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/08/03/introduci...

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

The thing is, with Excel the programming is gradual, you first just add some formulas, followed by conditional formatting, small macros, until eventually jumping into full VBA.

Alternatives, including Access, require good programming knowledge from day one.

But I still fundamentally agree with this approach. Perhaps not all users, but most users should be given a path toward more programming based approach to modelling.

I think lighswitch was stillborn when it wasn't distributed as part of office (irrespective of its merits, haven't tried it myself). Asking IT departments to deploy it was bound to fail. It needs to be available at the fingertips of excel users, like VBA is, always there, running with Excel, and you know it is available to everyone else so anything you do will run without having to install anything on their machine.

Powerapps look amazing to be honest. I actually would like to use that and the BI integration, but unfortunately I don't have enough reason to spend money on it. The small organising that I do need ends up in Airtable instead, but that's not even close. (I miss proper graphing features)