the following may not be true for everyone, but my experience is that it turns out when your wife says:
i would like you to make me a spreadsheet i can use for $foo
she does not instead mean:
i would like you to build me a coldfusion based web
application that connects to a sql server back end database
she really does just want a spreadsheet.
no matter how much more efficient having a database driven web app may be in the long run.