I remember on job where I wrote a lot of tools to load a database by reading an excel spreadsheet from perl[1]. It was amazingly fun.

1) perl does have some good libraries to read Excel files without exporting

I have this as a "temporary" solution (now three years old) for getting data into my database. OK, I am using Python, not Perl. There is nothing fun about debugging this.

The non technical users can't tell the difference between 2 2.0 ' 2.0'. Usually excel will display the same thing to them.

I recently replaced one of their excels with a web form. "Ughh,una mierda" (its shit). So I asked whast excel did that the web form didn't. Basically a bit of JS to give some copy paste functionality, and she is now a lot happier than that solution than she was with the excel.

Perl also has nice libraries for creating Excel files. Used that at my last job to generate reports from MySQL.

Yep, it is amazing how much b_tching about crappy reports ends when you just give the raw data to a customer and let them pivot table to their heart's desire.

So does Python.

Import and export. I get a lot of love from exporting to Excel from people who use what I make. I assume this feature makes it seem that they are doing a lot of work when they can quickly produce large spreadsheets for the boss. The boss? He usually doesn't know nor care. He knows he approved a check for some computer stuff some months ago.....