> Re Excel, they are making offline installs increasingly difficult and expensive, and yet their online version can't do many things Yes. I had an ugly experi

> Re Excel, they are making offline installs increasingly difficult and expensive, and yet their online version can't do many things Yes. I had an ugly experience with a customer who insisted on using the Excel online version. It was a mess. We are trying to avoid creating tools using Excel any more. Same as you with MATLAB, we are shifting as much as possible to Python. We are using an internal Django site to collect all the tools as apps when it makes sense. In some cases it's stuff that connects to laboratory equipment to take measurements, etc. and it might not make sense to tie it to Django. That said, you'd be surprised the kinds of things we've contorted Django into doing. We built a robotic test and manufacturing system that runs from Django. It was very interesting to figure out how to use the database for journaling and to maintain state. The last thing you want on a system like that is for the machine to lose state for whatever reason. It worked really well. Not sure I'd recommend it. I wanted to see if we could standardize on Django for the UI and data management on custom automation solutions. No verdict yet.