All of the cases where I have seen Excel sheets get "out of control" are not because someone came along and decided to implement a complex system in Excel, far

All of the cases where I have seen Excel sheets get "out of control" are not because someone came along and decided to implement a complex system in Excel, far from it. I tend to see small, well suited, sheets being created in Excel, and then iteratively new features get added "Wouldn't it be great to automatically get averages each month" "Perhaps we could pull in exchange rates so we have up to date currency values" "As we need to compare this to employees here, and because we actually have a list of employees in another sheet for holiday and sickness, why don't we put the employees into another separate sheet and cross reference it from both places" "When we add a new employee wouldn't it be nice if these sheets automatically update" "We want to pull in this live data every day at midnight, perhaps we can have an automated job for that" Then when someone says "hmm, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the job" there is often general agreement, but at that point there are lots of interconnected sheets, formulas, external data being pulled in, cron jobs, etc. and the system manages a lot of different things, none of which you particularly want to be without and despite the complexities, people have been with it over iterations, so they are actually quite familiar with how it all works. But then a couple of people with the knowledge leave, a new person takes over, and their first job is to remove Excel and come up with a much better system. They try, users complain it doesn't do certain things as well, over time in improves, somehow certain things never seem quite as good, but then new features have been added so people forget and find the next thing to complain about instead!