I have done a couple of gigs in life sciences and Excel is one of the big responsible for VB.NET to be still relevant.
I have met several researchers using Excel, not R, Python, Julia, nope plain old Excel, eventually with some VBA macros.
The more savvy ones, eventually ask IT for VB installation when they outgrown the VBA capabilities and carry on from there with either small Windows Forms based utilities or Office AddIns.
Any attempt to replace those sheets with proper applications has gotten plenty of push back until we basically offered enough Excel like features on the new applications.
This was me when our online meetings exploded and I had to record a ton of metrics manually without any prep or software. Now there is this digusting, VBA-augmented excel sheet with a million hacks being read by the c-levels to make very important changes by. I can't vouch for a single cell being accurate at this point. Even the few automatic metrics from the meeting software are misleading from the get go, but then they meet my black-box of doom.
I have met several researchers using Excel, not R, Python, Julia, nope plain old Excel, eventually with some VBA macros.
The more savvy ones, eventually ask IT for VB installation when they outgrown the VBA capabilities and carry on from there with either small Windows Forms based utilities or Office AddIns.
Any attempt to replace those sheets with proper applications has gotten plenty of push back until we basically offered enough Excel like features on the new applications.