If you're thinking regular office workers, they know of no alternative.

Excel works enough for small data, particularly when you don't do complex queries on it. The more you know of it, the better it works. The only other thing that offers similar benefits to Excel but works as a database is MS Access, but the mental model behind it is too complex for your average office worker who wasn't trained in it, and like most database systems, requires a lot of up-front work with figuring out the schema, and doesn't particularly like the schema being modified later on.

As far as I can tell, there's literally nothing else out there. No, random SaaS webapps du jour don't count, because they're universally slow, and also store the data in the cloud, instead of the local drive.

The mix of Excel & Access as a new application would be a killer app. Hasn’t someone already built that in the cloud?

Excel may not be a database solution, but it is the most commonly used database solution.

It's hard to say from here what would be the best thing for them to use, but simply using a modern spreadsheet format instead of the ancient xls seems fine for interchange.

There's not much to stop the devs from using open source tools to create a PHP web frontend and db backend for this data - and secure it as well.

Heck, if they still need to export, they could do that from the data too.

Sure - use Excel for POC, but get that DB backend up pronto.

I work in an office that relies way too much on Excel.

To consider your solution, first showstopper, it needs a server. We don't have a server, nor anyone who knows how to manage one. We'd need to ask IT, that will take months and they'll require a budget transfer, so we'd need to request it to management (which will need a business case to convince) and involve the finance guys. We can't just plug a RaspberryPi into the wall, not only that would get me fired, but also it wouldn't be able to connect to anything without the company's certificates for the proxy or whatever.

Second, we need people who can code in PHP (and their backups when they leave). Probably in practice we'd need IT to do that, so that's more months and budget required.

Obviously anything stored in the cloud is out of the question, just the authorizations and contracts to do that would take a year.

So in the end it ends up as a shared spreadsheet.

I'm sure, at a push, a PC could be co-opted to do the work while a server (even online) could then be brought up to speed and the data migrated - but that's your use case.

What we're talking about here is a government department who do have access to servers, but choose not to use them (or so it would seem).

How do you share the spreadsheet? Shared network drive? By email? With Excel?

Shared network drive usually