Or Is It

Every developer's soul when someone in the meeting says "Excel is not a database." You nod confidently, agreeing with this objectively correct statement. But then you glance at your production environment where half the company's critical business logic lives in a 47MB .xlsx file with macros that nobody dares to touch because Karen from accounting wrote them in 2009 and she's retired now. The file has circular references, merged cells used as primary keys, and somehow powers the entire invoicing system. It crashes twice a week but generates accurate reports. Is it a database? Technically no. Does it store, query, and retrieve structured data that your entire business depends on? Absolutely. The cognitive dissonance is real.