Comment by inferiorhuman

Damn It. Where are these problems today?

They're still here. When we had to generate reports for municipalities, and ingest new data from non-tech sorts of people. What did we choose? Excel 2003 XML. Because it's what we could import easily.

I feel ashamed at how much we put some of the smartest and hard-working people to work on yet-another-crud-rest-api.

Why? Excel is inherently poorly specified and the file format support matrix is a bit… unwieldly. Interoperability is terrible, any sort of multi-user use case becomes an exercise in archaic procedures, and the various scripting languages, while powerful, are janky as fuck.