Many people here have already echoed the overuse of Excel as a RDBMS - I have noticed this as well. The problem however (at least in my area - education) has co

Many people here have already echoed the overuse of Excel as a RDBMS - I have noticed this as well. The problem however (at least in my area - education) has come from the DB admins not wanting anyone to access "their" data due to security and speed concerns. Their solution - give someone CSV output from the table rather than allow then read only access to the data. Problem is you get CSV files saved to excel files and you end of with thousands of Excel files floating around between people all based off the same sets of data - that if given a better method of direct access could be more accurate and effective. The lack of a direct connection to the database of record is what I have seen causes much of the overuse of Excel and if more tools (i.e. Tableau) were implemented to make those connections I think (again in my area at least) the use of Excel would dramatically decrease.