Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft Office.  I honestly think that&#x27;s as far as it goes for most people.<p>I&#x27;ve felt the exact same pain as you - having the non-technical people work in Excel and moving it back and forth to a database is a nightmare.  I&#x27;ve started creating Flyway migrations for each import&#x2F;export sequence just so we can keep track of what&#x27;s live in our DB.  If you were working in CSV you could even script an import as part of a build process or something.<p>In some cases better products even exist.  For example LaTeX is a fantastic tool - you can create complex layouts (not just for documents, but also Illustrator-type tasks), automagically manage cross-document references&#x2F;citations and generate tables-of-content and bibliographies, lay out images and tables and formulas, modularize documents (eg by chapter) and best of all the documents are a plain-text &quot;source&quot; that you can easily check into revision control or merge between multiple simultaneous users.  <i>Zero</i> adoption outside the academic world and certain publishing niches (eg math textbooks).<p>Side note: one unfilled niche I&#x27;ve noticed is that there isn&#x27;t a good word- or character-level diff tool that&#x27;s appropriate for LaTeX.  Ideally you would want to be able to type natural paragraphs and have the diff pick out changes by word instead of line (but preferably also identify command tokens more greedily up to a line).  You can break a paragraph across several lines, but if you&#x27;re making heavy revisions it just ends up being a solid block of line changes.<p>One more question: is there a &quot;worksheet&quot; or &quot;notebook&quot; concept in something like Mathematica that might be a better model for the type of work you&#x27;re considering?  I know Mathematica has a pretty complete feature set, it very well might have database hookups and an appropriate workflow for that type of thing.