Give someone an excel file and they are perfectly happy. Give them a web app to do the same process and suddenly their "needs" forces you to completely abstract

Give someone an excel file and they are perfectly happy. Give them a web app to do the same process and suddenly their "needs" forces you to completely abstract all of the concepts to something entirely unrecognizable from the start. It seems to me I see more and more a growing distance between how data is stored in a sql db and how the data is actually rendered or represented in the application.