At work we have had problems with excel changing values of numerical entries due to different locale formatting multiple times in the past, and many times causing hours of lost time till the culprit (excel) was found. Other types of values that are completely inconvenient for excel include social security numbers and phone numbers; which one would assume are more general purpose and thus closer to the standard use cases of excel than genes. Still excel is messing these things up. Opening a csv file is also a non-trivial overly complicated endeavour for excel in year 2024, which should be done with a double click (somehow other spreadsheet programs manage to handle csv files much more easily). The worst is that excel is usually used by non-technical people, who misunderstand these idiosyncrasies and time is wasted over and over.
My work frustration with excel is not so much excel itself, but that people will destroy / delete / not understand formulas (or think they’re improving them…) and then the end result of their edits is garbage. However this is my fault usually for not using the protect / lock features well enough. I do know that notes explanations get overlooked. I’ve mitigated this slightly by almost always having in our shared a blank start, that’s just a backup to start from, and then the actual one to be used.
