While there are good reasons for not using excel, be careful not to dump too fast. Excel's format is publicly available (if a little horrible to read XML), and

While there are good reasons for not using excel, be careful not to dump too fast. Excel's format is publicly available (if a little horrible to read XML), and it imports/exports CSV fine. Yes you do have to pay for it, but I find lots of R extensions don't work well on Windows, so OS-lock isn't a solved problem. You can use Office 365 in the web browser if you want to access from linux. The biggest issue is, as you say, don't try to put 1M+ rows into Excel. I agree. But I've worked with lots of people who have 20-1000 data points, and there Excel is great. I'd love to have an alternative to suggest to people, that scales well with them, but we aren't there yet, and Excel still fills an important niche. Assuming people only use it because they are idiots (not saying you said that, but many do) and not looking at why they use it is what is stopping other tools replacing it.