On an all hands, someone talking about a spreadsheet and my brain hears "so we should turn this into a database with a front end but you're not a dev and none of us care enough to help".

Are we the bad guys?

It is incredibly hard to replace software that already does what the user needs with something better.

Sure, you could build a specific application to replace that spreadsheet. But will it really be better - and especially better supported - than the office application, the user is currently using?

@Oktokolo depends on scale and specificity.

if it's too big, it'll be slow af and the maximum size of a cell is 255, not to mention the file is bloated.

if it's too specific, they'll spend a long time working on the formulas and it'll still be clunky. they could use vba, but at that point you should actually just make a small app for that shit

(speaking as someone who works with both, sometimes integrated)

Hahaha, they were literally talking about managing edit conflicts with Dropbox permissions... It's worse than it sounds...

Another department had this too, an Excel sheet that gets shared around, copied, changed, multiple languages, 0 structure

We started building an api for them, and they completely spazzed out and got cold feet. We gave them the prototype and dipped.

Keep in mind these are semi-technical people that maintain hardware. Let them burn.