Excel sheets aren't very maintainable. You get a big grid, plus named ranges. There aren't good tools for generalisation or abstraction, so big sheets have all the usual problems of bad software: hard to understand, hard to change, full of inconsistencies, etc. There are also no good options for source control, modular reuse, etc.

I work on a desk which has a lot of vital calculations in Excel spreadsheets. They work, and we make money, but it takes a lot of human effort (expensive trader effort!) to keep them working properly. If we want to scale up - more people, more products, etc - we need to move more and more of those calculations into software.

Improvements to or replacements for the spreadsheet as tools for non-programmers would certainly be helpful. But better tools and techniques for programmers to port functionality from spreadsheets to 'real' software would also be helpful.

Excel spreadsheets aren't maintainable, but in context there are some subtleties. If the process is upgraded to a full-blown piece of 'real' software, now you need a full-blown software dev to maintain it. A better result from more resources isn't a clean improvement, it is just a change.

Straddling the line between 'technically best outcome' and 'cheapest workable outcome' is what businesses strive to do. In most mature businesses change should be approached extremely cautiously; everybody loves changing things and the costs are frequently big.

If your risk is less than it costs to build the software then that's totally acceptable, but what is unacceptable is billion dollar businesses using spreadsheets to manage critical business operations.

Probably because studies show that people who use excel to manage finance end up coming up with different numbers. JP Morgan lost 6 billion because of excel, and these are preventable problems. It's because you aren't codifying your process, you're just memorizing it and trusting that your memory won't change. Trusting that you won't miss a step. The moment you start doing serious calculations on your data you would be better writing some form of software which can actually handle the amount of complexity that you have in your job. Excel is opaque, hard to manage, easy to diverge. The agency I'm at have made a tremendous reduction in errors by migrating away from excel. Sure it's more work nailing down every process, but they are actually nailed down and you can see them and evaluate whether they are actually correct. You won't have multiple competing standards within a business because we can share our processes. If you think excel is enough you're either doing very simple or low risk job, or much more likely you are floating a lot of totally unnecessary and expensive risk. In finance CENTS matter.

Two opposite ends of the spectrum. The engineer who has to constantly keep up on the latest technology, then there are people who use excel, which is a program from the beginning of time/Windows.