Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.

They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.

I just wish the whole 'cloud' thing would die in a ditch specifically for people like that.

No, most use-cases don't need to be in a cloud.

You are 99.9% paying more for that setup than having people who understand servers.

And if you need the cloud, then hooray for you, but it should not need to be subsidized by thousands of small customers who jumped on the wrong train.

This is why I always save contents as a new file instead of overwriting the original one when I'm using a machine that isn't mine. I've been burned so many times by flimsy newline characters, proper unicode support, legacy encoding and many other stuff you assume it should be already in place.

Not us, ours are google sheets

I think it's a hole in education. Unless you go to school for IT or programming the most advanced thing you're probably going to be taught is spreadsheet, and yet out in the world of business you need actual database software, and Excel can kinda sorta look like it's somewhat accomplishing that for a while so that's what gets used.

When the only tool society has been taught exists is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.