Agreed. A small example: you have some internal database, and now different teams want to have some data analysis done. The fun thing to do would be to write

Agreed. A small example: you have some internal database, and now different teams want to have some data analysis done. The fun thing to do would be to write a generic reporting front end, and easy enough to use so that non-technical people can use to create their own report. And the pragmatic solution that is to instead spew out all relevant data as CSV with a BOM, so that Excel can easily read it. Turns out a generic data analysis tool exists, and it's unlikely you can beat Excel at its job. Producing some CSV files from a DB is orders of magnitude less work than creating your own analysis front end, so in nearly all cases, this is the solution you're paid to do.