I agree with you 100%. iBankers use Excel because it does what they want. One of the main reasons I left was because I got tired of trying to re-invent the excel wheel with every piece of software. There was always an inherent lack of trust that any UI was "doing it properly," so we always had to add the failsafe of export to CSV so people could do it themselves in Excel. Mind-boggling inefficiency.
The value of export is beyond just checking on UI.
If they can expert it to Excel, then they can do whatever simple data analysis they just made up. No reason to wait for IT to implement whatever stats they are curious about, order it in some new way or whatever. Doing those things in excel is very fast and they get to have complete control over it.
Even if they only color cells and rows depending on some ad-hoc rule that will never be used again, excel still added them a lot of value.
Plus, I would pay gold for users that actually test system before relying on it. There is always shortage of testers and if the customer would do some of it, he deserves a discount.
I don't disagree. The problem is that people are error prone, and excel doesn't value check. We had to build large BPM-driven processes in order to account for this. Also I don't want to imply that users got to test the system while it was being built. That would imply that there was a logical product development process in place, which for most projects, there wasn't. Users got something that had been frankensteined over the course of the project, and muckity-mucks wondered why projects and applications went stagnant because users stopped using them and went back to excel.
I agree with you 100%. iBankers use Excel because it does what they want. One of the main reasons I left was because I got tired of trying to re-invent the excel wheel with every piece of software. There was always an inherent lack of trust that any UI was "doing it properly," so we always had to add the failsafe of export to CSV so people could do it themselves in Excel. Mind-boggling inefficiency.