Coders get a little sniffy about Excel sometimes, but it's so good at achieving 80%-ness across multiple axes that I can't see it being displaced.

- the lowest barrier to entry for pretty much anyone in corporate life. Boot PC, there it is.

- rapid data exploration. Just put something in a cell. Play around.

- extensive self-, community-, pro-, and AI help.

- an impressively powerful programming engine. Well, two really, one of which survives after 30 years and multiple murder attempts by Microsoft. You can build complete applications, UIs, database front ends, etc.

- serious tooling for power users via toolpaks and plugins

- just enough tooling to add visual polish to outputs.

Excel isnt the best at many things (I still pine for Improv, tbh) but it's good enough at a lot of things for that not to matter, and its so easy to get started, the allure is hard to ignore.

Gsheets comes close, but still (to my mind) smells amateurish for power users. Maybe that's my problem rather than Google's.