This, to me, is now the rate limiting step in this architecture; there are probably 1000x as many people who can operate in Excel than people who can operate on a “data stack”. Yes, the fundamental goal of these data stacks is to enable insight and decisions “at scale”.. but beyond that you have probably hundreds or thousands of employees who just need to do quick analyses for one-off decisions that can be handled by Excel. But there’s usually a benefit to those analyses being “operationalized” and integrated into the broader architecture.. having a live connection to the central database, and having results piped back... so many Excel spreadsheets get emailed back and forth, completely out of the stack’s purview.
Will MS modify Excel 365 fast enough to meet this need? Will another spreadsheet program disrupt Excel’s dominance? Will another player come in with the ability to “ingest” arbitrary Excel files? Another major issue is Excel’s massive failure when it comes to handling uncertainty in data. I’ll be curious to see how it all plays out.
