Most of the problems listed in the article are just side-effects of spreadsheets in general (e.g. have to make formulas, build the sheet, add notes, etc) and ar

Most of the problems listed in the article are just side-effects of spreadsheets in general (e.g. have to make formulas, build the sheet, add notes, etc) and aren't just specific to Excel. The same also applies to Numbers, LibreOffice, and Google Sheets. In this regard, the author's point doesn't really stand. Excel may be the most widely used spreadsheet software (going by estimation, don't quote me on this), but it is far from perfect. There are plenty of annoyances I've found while using Excel, and have actually enjoyed using Google Sheets a lot to remedy some of them. The problem I see is that people in business are ingrained with using Excel since it's what they have always used. Excel is to corporations what the Ford F-150 is to America. Part of this is thanks to .xls and .xlsx files. Unless there is fully-compatibility support to seamlessly open these files in other software, it's a huge pain in the ass to deal with inconsistencies and formatting from conversions (ex. transferring from Excel to Google Sheets or vica versa). There is no widely used open spreadsheet file standard (Yea, there's CSV/TSV, but how many business people or non-analysts save their spreadsheets as those filetypes when emailing them around), which really sucks when the potential for something better than Excel is apparent if it could actually reach critical mass.