When Excel is not enough to deal with the data
Eletricity Market Simulation
Transformation of an Excel energy market simulator into a web site and program.
Call Center Call processing
Deal with millions of call records to understand what is going on the call center
Excel is very powerful but when you have thousands of lines filled with formulas the system starts to become slower and slower.
Excel allows to use tables and even databases but if your project is really database driven it will work better in a database oriented environment.
To allow people in different locations to access to the same information a distributed system has advantages and a web approach can be better
For a detailed statistics analysis Excel has a limit in the functions it has available and on what is possible to do.
In very large datasets with millions of lines is more important how to computer is able to handle the load.
When you have many persons wanting to use the same data at the same time usually Excel locks the full spreadsheet for just one user.