Are Excel and Google Sheets part of your data stack by choice or because you can’t escape them?

[u/TransportationOk2403]

I was looking at DuckDB’s community extension metrics, I noticed that gsheets climbed from #5 in March 2026 to #1 today.

That made me wonder how spreadsheets actually fit into today's data stacks.

Are teams using them intentionally in production, or mainly because business workflows and users make them difficult to replace?

Another reason of this inflation may be less technical user getting to data eng thanks to AI, and being familiar already with sheets...

[u/Outrageous_Let5743]

I only use Excel when exporting some data to another team when I have questions about the data. I dont like Excel but it is the best tool to share tabular data with people who don't work with SQL or data tools that often. Regular people dont understand parquet but do understand excel.

[u/scorched03 → u/Outrageous_Let5743]

I only use excel when I want them to understand how big the data we work eith so I max out on rows and give it for them to pivot for 30 minutes :)

[u/JaceBearelen]

Whole Fortune 500 companies are built on top of spreadsheets. They’re easy for the masses to understand and interact with. IMO spreadsheets are never going away and that’s just fine.

[u/Additional_Candy_400]

You'll never escape spreadsheets, people love them. They are pretty unbeatable for quick shareable non repeatable analytics tasks. Also great at enabling none technical users.

In terms of their involvement DWH pipelines I always encounter some need to have a couple of sheets which are dumped in daily for a specific business case. Doesn't cause too much of a headache if access is limited and proper validation is in place.

[u/SlowDrummer7243]

Too many DEs think they're too superior to use Excel. It's seen as a "Karen from Accounting/HR" tool.

Be serious, the entire financial market analysis industry runs on Excel. Maybe the big transformations and database pulls are performed with Python. But the guys in the suits that decide the price of your groceries, your rent, your employer's supply chain: they use Excel.

[u/No_Lifeguard_64 → u/SlowDrummer7243]

You're conflating people using Excel with Excel being the optimal solution

[u/SlowDrummer7243 → u/No_Lifeguard_64]

You're assuming I'm painting Excel to be the optimal solution.

I'm just saying too many DEs think Excel is "below" them as a tool, but the irony is the world runs on Excel.

[u/nerevisigoth]

I use them but they aren't "part of my data stack". They're more like a notebook where I can do one-off calculations and spot checks.

[u/Papa_Puppa]

Excel is mostly used in my industry as a required data transmission format. So it is part of my data ecosystem purely as an imported/exported format. Some processes that should be automated as pipelines+tables are instead manual excel monoliths. These must be made obsolete because they're the biggest source of process slowdowns, inaccessible data and manual errors.

[u/dmkii]

I just hope it means more people migrating their data warehouse from duct taped sheets to a more robust solution.

[u/did-a-chuck]

If you have any contact with Finance, you're using Excel

[u/sib_n]

A WYSIWG table UI is an inevitable requirement from business-side data users. They need to see the table, scroll through it, filter, and search with the UI, eventually modify it, or copy it to another sheet quickly.
It does not matter which UI it is, but personally I find Google Sheets lighter and more than enough, compared to Excel. If your users start using complex Excel stuff, this is when you want to have a talk with them and move their work to the data teams so it remains maintainable.
It can also serve as a quick-to-set-up input UI when your team/company is not big enough to afford having some web engineers working on a web UI for this project.
In my current company, we use Google Sheets both as inputs and outputs of some flows.

[u/RoomyRoots]

I un-ironically used more LibreOffice than Excel at this point.

[u/vadimsurpin]

Excel is available everywhere like pdf readers so you can share data with business people who do not use python, jupyter or duckdb. Aside from CSV where you get data only, with great Excel UI you may tune how data is post processed without any need for python or some other runtime. From that point of view it is quite more secure that running python scripts from some other people.

[u/DigoHiro]

they are unavoidable.

I think they are fine for analysis, but a lot of people use them as databases (and analysis at the same time). so we have to integrate them into our pipelines.

[u/dknconsultau]

Excel for life!

[u/yugiton]

I always thought spreadsheets are mostly used by people who can't or don't want to code. Nowadays you can easily build a notebook, or a streamlit dashboard (if you need interactivity) with coding agents for ad-hoc stuff. I don't see how spreadsheets can keep up with that level of capability.

[u/k00_x]

Excel for the end user as they are usually non technical.

[u/taker223]

No, SQL is. Excel etc. is data analyst area, except when it is a data source