He probably means Excel the industry standard program for data collection, management and analysis for everyone not working in IT.

And therefore doing it in a way that is NOT reproducible, easy to audit nor reliable.

How many times have we seen papers and science blown because someone made a mistake in the 50 steps they did to get their results?

CSV > Excel

Not understanding how you can rank CSV vs Excel. Excel is a platform that let's you easily build up complex calculations with different statistics, graphs, formatting, and a lot more. CSV is an interop file format for plain text tabular data.

Yes, I'd rather a raw dump of data in CSV than XLS, but it seems like you're making a more general statement than that.

CSV > Excel in every way except the ones people working care about.

I'd be hard-pressed to find a more convenient and flexible tool than Excel. Relational databases are too inflexible, toolchain just sucks, and as for the CSV manipulation - sure, if you know how to code.

There's a reason people in banks, accounting, etc. keep doing everything in Excel even after proper systems are introduced. It's not because they're stupid; it's because all the "right" solutions suck hard and they need to work around the broken tools to do their job.

There's a huge market opportunity here.

lol