And a lot of corporate IT types are terrified at the idea of half-real databases, not that wrongly, because they figure that someone is going to cook up something in MS Access (sorry, Windows-centric perspective), others are going to come to rely on it, and then five years later someone is going to ask them for urgent help with this monstrosity that they've never seen before whose creator is long gone.
Net result, of course, is that the monstrosities that small teams/companies/etc need to actually do what they do... end up "written" in Excel instead of Access or Filemaker or one of the other small-time databases that used to actually be popular. The good news, I think, from the IT departments' perspective is that spreadsheets are so much more broken at being databases that you couldn't survive a few weeks without someone who actually understands how it works. So they're less likely to get entrenched in a way that no one knows how to work them...
The bad news, of course, is that spreadsheets make for absolutely dreadful databases. Especially if you're not even using the newer more databasey features that Excel has added over the years.
But... it is amazing how much real world 'database' work is done (poorly) with spreadsheets, filters, and PivotTables. Often by people who don't realize that a better way of doing this... has technically existed for decades... but has a bit of an entry curve.
Doesn't help that spreadsheets are ubiquitous. You have 10-50K rows (or much less) that you need to crunch in some way in the next couple of hours? Excel is already sitting there on your workstation, something else... isn't. And I think finance/business school types tend to be fairly well-trained on how to crunch modest amounts of data with spreadsheets...
