Using Excel as a database is the tech equivalent of wearing socks with sandals - technically functional, but everyone who sees it will judge you. The moment you admit to storing production data in .xlsx files, you've earned yourself a one-way ticket to developer prison. No trial, no jury, just straight to jail. Sure, it starts innocently enough. "It's just a small project," you say. "We only have 50 rows," you promise. Fast forward six months and you're dealing with VLOOKUP nightmares, circular references, and that one guy who keeps saving it as .xls instead of .xlsx. Meanwhile, actual databases are sitting right there, crying in PostgreSQL. The prison guard's reaction is completely justified. This is a crime against data integrity, ACID compliance, and everything our ancestors fought for when they invented relational databases in the 1970s.