The reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming.
If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?
CSV is a simple data interchange format. Better than excel in that context.
PDF is the canonical way to preserve formatting where that is important. A court document electronically filed in PDF in 1999 is identically rendered today. The source .doc or WordPerfect file is not.
Not exactly, I like to graph "xSV" data as it is streaming in to the PC, with processing before displaying and filling the cells with the filtered data. You can choose which functions you want to apply before data hits the cells and let the cells do their magic after that. Pretty much a real-time live graph, other than a little latency.
After data collection (or during), then output can be made in any format you would like. In addition to what anybody would want to print right off the spreadsheet.
The XLS(X) file forms a database and UI, contains a copy of the input macros and output macros, and you save the whole thing every time which backs it all up (over and over and over again) in a form that anybody can open anywhere with a PC that only has Windows & Office. And whoever opens it will be right up to speed as good as they can be with whatever abilities they have using Excel alone.
If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?