Heh ye well I am exaggerating alot.

My point is KISS in the amount of knowledge required to do something, not just the implementation complexity.

E.g. on my last job we were really machine engineers doing some c programming. Good luck establishing fancy pancy workflows. Instead of trying to use relative paths and setup env variables for dependencies we just all had the same version controlled folder on c:\ with everything in it. And it is fine.

Querying Excel files doesn't sound easy, though. SQL is not that hard. Though easiest would probably be a Ruby-on-Rails-like framework that just sets up your basic CRUD-stuff for you.

Sure. It was meant as an exaggerated joke, but I mean the point (with a bad example). You would probably need to write some VBA to query the excel doc, which is not easier then using SQL.