Its funny you mention Google Sheets...At the non-profit where i worked we would research whatever available software/tools would help...and sometimes we looked at software/tools built specifically for non-profit use cases...but you know what? Almost half the time, for many reasons (sometimes because time is of the essence, or because non-techie non-profit people can not wrap their heads around some fancy non-profit tool/app), someone just ends up spionngin up some google sheet or share an excel file via sharepoint/oneDrive, etc. I used to get annoyed with this approach but then realized that i can't fully blame my former colleagues because sometimes they had to get stuff done and didn't have time/other luxury to research the "perfect tool"...Or, the landscape of available tools built for non-profits either sucks, is expensive for the value they supposed to bring, or non-profit folks don;t know how to take advantage of the purpose buolt tools,. etc. So, i learned to not get all annoyed when someone reaches for google sheets, office docs, whatever if it means that a human is helping out another human. ;-)
Programmers have instinctive contempt for spreadsheets, both legitimate (I had to scale/implement a real system to do what ridiculouly spaghetti-coded spreadsheet X did) and illegitimate (this allow untrained office person X to do what I, awesome programmer, could be doing for 10x the cost).
Spreadsheets are by now almost... 40 years old? And they are ubiquitous in business still despite the explosion on software written for various purposes. The spreadsheet model is a powerful computing and automation platform, with good-enough zero-code UI and organization.
I think it is also a combination of
- the power that spreadsheets bring (a Turing complete machine, can't get any better)
- the UI that they pack (essentially a fancy freeform DB)
Together, they are easy to grok, use and manipulate for most tasks. Add in the observation that most CRUD apps are basically slow spreadhseets, and you have a deal.
