It's a bit surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't created a product that's "you have an Excel file in one of our cloud storage systems, here's a way for you to vibe code and host a web app whose storage is backed entirely by that file, where access control is synced to that file's access, and real-time updates propagate in both directions as if someone were editing it in native Excel on another computer. And you can eject a codebase that you, as the domain expert, can hand to a tech team to build something more broadly applicable for your organization."
Nowhere near the level of complexity that would enter your threat model. But this would be the first, minimal step towards customers building their own tools, and the fact that not even this workflow has entered the zeitgeist is... well, it's not the best news for some of the most bullish projections of AI adoption in businesses large and small.
Probably because Microsoft knows vibe coding is _not_ an actual viable way to build production ready code and does not want to deal with the liability issues of prompting customers to move from a working Excel sheet to a broken piece of software that looks like it works.
In my experience, it's actually quite hard to move a business from an excel sheet to software. Because an excel sheet allows the end user to easily handle every edge case and they likely don't even think in terms of "edge cases"
> Probably because Microsoft knows vibe coding is _not_ an actual viable way to build production ready code and does not want to deal with the liability issues of prompting customers to move from a working Excel sheet to a broken piece of software that looks like it works.
Whilst you could plausibly argue that Microsoft have spent the past 25 years attempting to stamp them out, this is exactly what VB6 and VBA were.
People built whole businesses on/around these technologies, and people liked them because you could get something working fast. As maligned as they are nowadays they were so widely used because they delivered value.
I miss MSAccess, but for the modern age. It has been replaced by basic CRUD using your platform of choice, but it's not as easy.
That would be similar to your solution, so either one would work.
I think that there might be some similar alternatives (maybe Airtable? probably using Lovable or Firebase counts) but nothing that is available for me for now.
APEX is probably just as widely used now as Access was. Access likely had higher market share but of a much smaller market. There are gazillions of APEX apps out there.
You can use something like Salesforce as an app platform if you want. It lets you create "Custom Objects", which are basically tables, write queries, and so on.
It's just that the hassle of dealing with that platform tends to be similar to the hassle of setting up an app yourself, and now you're paying a per-user license cost.
Even Salesforce doesn't have a good way to quickly port an Excel-based workflow, with file handoffs and backwards compatibility, into Salesforce. In theory, you could have an LLM generate all the metadata files that would execute a relevant schema migration, generate the interface XML, and build the right kinds of API calls and webhooks... but understanding what it's doing requires a Ph.D. in Salesforce, and many don't have time for that.
Microsoft PowerApps has similar workflows for at least 2 years now. The professional development experience is lacking, however enterprise users can create many applications based on Excel files.
Nowhere near the level of complexity that would enter your threat model. But this would be the first, minimal step towards customers building their own tools, and the fact that not even this workflow has entered the zeitgeist is... well, it's not the best news for some of the most bullish projections of AI adoption in businesses large and small.