Trillions of decisions have been made off a tool that has poor error handling and data consistency issues. Blame is not entirely on either the user or the software, but the tool is too trusted without validation.
Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality but people use excel in many ways. Python is out of reach for most people. SQL would be an improvement as well. I assumed airtable or similar would replace excel over time. But the sunk cost for existing report and the sharablity seems to keep excel in control.
[Study that was at the core for Europe's austerity and European debt crisis contained excel errors when fixed showed the inverse of original hypothesis.](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...)
Programmable commands instead of a data grid would be huge improvement to quality but people use excel in many ways. Python is out of reach for most people. SQL would be an improvement as well. I assumed airtable or similar would replace excel over time. But the sunk cost for existing report and the sharablity seems to keep excel in control.