I've never seen two consistently created Excel workbooks. There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world. It's possible that a more formal system would have less duplicated effort. It's also possible that doesn't matter.
"Everything takes forever because you have to write requirements" is a feature of software development. At the end you get software that does something that you (presumably) understand. Excel is a gold mine of undocumented terms, processes and functionality.
It's fast to build but don't pretend it gives any of the benefits of proper software development processes. The value proposition is in fact that it has none of those guarantees.
> There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world.
There's usually more people who know Excel than people who can create systems. Meaning, the inefficiency is not that important. Some things just cannot wait or depend on a much smaller amount of people.
On the other hand I spent a lot of time as a data analyst explaining to business folks who "know excel" that their spreadsheets don't match because they used a different definition of week, or revenue.
"Everything takes forever because you have to write requirements" is a feature of software development. At the end you get software that does something that you (presumably) understand. Excel is a gold mine of undocumented terms, processes and functionality.
It's fast to build but don't pretend it gives any of the benefits of proper software development processes. The value proposition is in fact that it has none of those guarantees.