I'll strongly disagree in turn. I personally know some successful founders whose business, in one important facet, could be summed as "get rid of those painful

I'll strongly disagree in turn. I personally know some successful founders whose business, in one important facet, could be summed as "get rid of those painful Excel spreadsheets". It's not the use or not of Excel. As with most things, and as TFA discusses, it's about the pain factor. Spreadsheets are, far and away, the greatest success in end-user programming to date. But like all software tools, their usage can grow into painful places. Do the users have massive, error-prone and/or time-consuming workflows built around those spreadsheets? Is it very hard to bring new staff up to speed, or to keep existing staff compliant with process, or to meet day-to-day business goals with those spreadsheets? Is there no solution between "painful spreadsheet" and "$X,000,000 contract w/ bigcorp" to solve those problems? If 'yes' is cropping up in answer to those questions, then lifting the logic from ad-hoc process around spreadsheets into software may be a good idea and/or a good business.