Dealing with PDFs (as in, coding a system that can import/export/display them) is more obnoxious than dealing with excel spreadsheets. Unless your system is a

Dealing with PDFs (as in, coding a system that can import/export/display them) is more obnoxious than dealing with excel spreadsheets. Unless your system is a PDF library (as in, you make the black-box dependency that other systems use to handle PDF exports), everything you do with PDFs will be through some annoying black-box dependency that is a pain to use. Even relatively complex HTML is much more fun to work with than PDF.