Because of excel's swiss-army-knife powers, it will always be present somewhere in most organisations, I agree.

But if you start your business with your stock and order tracking in excel, your customer list in excel, and your accounts in excel, it's not unusual to outgrow excel in some of those areas fairly quickly.

Right, Amazon's inventory system certainly can't be run out of a spreadsheet. But even for something like a very successful restaurant with half a dozen locations across the state, a few spreadsheets often sit comfortably in the middle of it all.

Accounts in Excel is a recipe for disaster

Startups hardly bother with licensing excel/365 these days, and just pop into sheets. From my experience, you don't usually start bringing excel into the equation until you hire that one sales manager that insists on it, or the "Microsoft guy/gal" that just keeps asking "why aren't we using excel?" over and over again.

Or until you're at the scale where you're working with datasets/queries simply too big or too complex for Sheets to handle effectively.

At my current job (late-ish stage SF startup), most of us default to Google Sheets, but there have been enough use cases for "real" Excel alone to warrant setting up Office 365 licensing/accounts and defining a flow for that at the corporate level instead of just one-off licenses here and there.

Our finance team in particular (or at least specific key members thereof) has to use the Windows version of excel because both the macOS version and Google Sheets rapidly buckle under the datasets they're manipulating in their monthly reconciliations. My team has been working on various tools and systems (mostly as extensions to our ERP) to better automate some of these things, but Excel is still a reality until that happens for all their use cases.

> Or until you're at the scale where you're working with datasets/queries simply too big or too complex for Sheets to handle effectively.

At which, again from my perspective and view of things which may be wrong, startups are more likely to automate/productize that so they can better maintain and dogfood it if possible instead of letting someone's Excel workbook grow into a pet ML tool that only they understand.

I think this is where our respective experiences diverge, at least momentarily. Yeah, eventually a company will (hopefully) try to build better tools (as I and the rest of my team are trying to do in our case), but there will be an often-long gap between some employee creating a spreadsheet-based monstrosity and some engineering team turning that into a better tool/system.

Amen. 90% of the time, companies build process and automation on top of Excel. Success for SaaS is changing HOW companies use Excel, not IF.