I've used (and designed) large and complex Excel systems for MoD and Airbus. Excel is used because the moment you use anything else, corporate IT takes over, ensuring nothing ever works, everything is prohibitively expensive and secured to the point of uselessness.

This is typical in any corporate scale body. Central IT always wants total dictatorial control, limits access to powerful tools, and removes flexibility, so that leaves Excel, Access and occasionally SQL server (which is expensive and not without its own problems)

Sometimes the only way to get anything done at all is with Excel and Access, and it's the only way to get results fast. If you have a project on like that, the very last thing you do is involve central IT departments. They are productivity slayers.

If they'd done it any other way, the system would still be at the PowerPoint presentation stage, with business graduates producing org charts for diversity managers and nowhere near an actual programmer. They'd have spent a hundred million to produce nothing at all.

The advantage to keeping things basic is the ability to rapidly adapt. Centrally procured big systems are useless for this. Even small changes takes weeks and months. And if they get the specs wrong, as often they do, you end up with very expensive junk.

And then you have the worst of all worlds where by order of the bosses, using the expensive white elephant is mandatory but you still need to get the job done so it all gets processed by exports into excel anyway. Back where you started.

This is common in public and private sector. Universities too. They all have their big SAP/Oracle systems but somewhere in the organisation there's a stressed nonentity in a portakabin holding the entire thing together with hastily scripted Excel VBA functions.

HBOS, Lloyds, MoD, Airbus, JP Morgan, Cambridge University, various investment banks and engineering firms all have key Excel systems - and they all break down, but usually get fixed over the weekend, which is more than you can say for big expensive mainframes.